Baler cleaning and more blues

I cleaned my baler this afternoon.  What I thought would take an hour or so took all afternoon.  Initially I planned on doing minor cleaning as I plan on cutting and baling another neighbor's field once my haybine's u-joint is fixed.  But I got carried away and did a thorough cleaning.

During the cleaning I noticed one chain was wrong.  The chain was on the wrong side of a pulley. The following photo was taken after I fixed the problem.  The right red arrow shows the pulley.  Since the pulley was not tensioning the chain, the chain rubbed on a piece of metal (shown by left arrow).

The chain fix wasn't too bad to do.   The next problem was more difficult.

Once I finished cleaning the baler, I opened the baler door to do a last check inside.  That is when I noticed the problem with one of the bottom belts.   The rightmost belt was under the next belt.

View from the front of the baler.

View from inside the baler.

How the belt got across the disc divider (shown by the red arrows) is a mystery.  I looked in the baler's manual and their only solution was how to remove everything in order to change bottom belts.  Unlike the top belts, the bottom belts do not have "stitches" one can remove to take a belt off.  For a bottom belt one must take off:

1. the twine box in order to reach bolts, nuts, and cotter pines behind the box, then
2. the pickup bar (the faded yellow seen in a previous photo), then
3. the roll bar, then
4. the bar with the disc dividers.

Man, o man!  A lot of work!

Maybe there is some way I can pry the belt back into the correct place.  I was able to unhook the tensioning bars for the disc divider.  That gave me a little more play.  Still the belt had to go over the one disc divider.

I had gotten my neighbor Curtis to come over and look in case he had other ideas.  With both of us using crowbars we worked and worked and finally got the belt back into place.  Since the belts were on top of one another they were pinched by two roller bars (seen in photo with the yellow pickup bar).  Curtis used a crowbar to pry the rollers apart while I worked the belt sideways until they no longer were on top of one another.    Then I used a smaller crowbar to get the edge of the belt over the disc divider.   Then more working and prying and pulling to get all of the belt over the divider.

I re-tensioned the disc divider and hope that prevents this from happening in the future.

In the photo with the yellow pickup bar you can see one bottom belt has a tear.  I think I can still use the belt for now - as replacing the belt would be a major undertaking.

So the baler is clean and put away for now.  But for not as long as I had planned.  This evening I started to move the hay bales to the NE pasture.  Some bales were loose, others were not twined well.  To wrap twine around a bale, I tie the end of the twine to some hay, toss it into the pickup, then run the baler to suck the twine and a little more into the baler, then keep the bale spinning so the twine wraps around the bale.  It seems as if on some bales the starting twine with hay did not 'stick' well and the twine wrapped loosely.  I picked up a couple bales and part of the bale fell down.  On one bale so much hay fell that the twine fell too and then the whole bale fell apart.  Other bales only lost small chunks when lifted.  Most bales are holding together but I drive slowly as I am afraid a big bump may shake some of the bale loose.

On some bales the end of the twine did not stick to the bale, and when I drove the tractor, twine got caught under the tractor's tire and then the twine started to come off the bale. For all bales I now check for a loose twine end after I lift the bale, further slowing my work down.

I only got ten bales moved before dark.  Once I get all the bales moved I'll see how much of a mess I will have to clean up.

For the one bale that fell mostly apart I will have to re-bale it.  Oh joy.  The fun never ends with this barley, oats and pea hay.