Yesterday I ended up raking the entire field. There were clumps of 'not dry' hay here and there, and since the raking was going well I did the entire field.
It did sprinkle briefly while I raked. Again it was sunny when the rain fell. Ironically on the radio the song, "Walking on Sunshine" was playing as it rained.
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| Rain cloud |
Then at 2 pm I started to bale the hay. I got about 10 feet when one belt broke / came undone. No idea why. I had earlier run the baler without hay to make sure everything turned and worked. Why would the belt break at the start of putting hay in it when there was no pressure from a bale of hay?
I rethreaded the belt and discovered it was 10 inches too short. What?! I checked and doubled checked I threaded the belt correctly. Yup, it was. I remembered one belt had a short piece added and wondered if it was this belt. I searched the hay over and over for a short piece of belt. Nothing.
In the past I had a belt get twisted. I unlaced the belt, untwisted it, and rethreaded the belt and re-laced it. I didn't have to perform any extra stretching to re-lace the belt. I tried to come up with some method to stretch the belt together but had nothing. I asked my neighbor Curtis for ideas. With a 10 inch gap he thought it couldn't be stretched that much and that a piece of belt was missing.
I looked through the hay again for a missing piece of belt. Nothing.
By now it was 4 pm. I called the John Deere dealership to see if they could fix the belt. They are located south of Kalispell on the other side of town. Rush hour traffic was bad but I drove there.
My baler is very old. Apparently balers don't come with 12 inch belts anymore. They didn't have a wide belt in stock to patch my belt. They had a 6 inch belt and they could cut 12 inches and turn the belt sideways. That wouldn't cover the 10 inch gap. They looked up the belt's specifications and found the length is supposed to be 40 ft, 6 1/2 inches. My belt was 40 ft, 3 inches. What? 3 inches versus 10 inches? What gives?
They suggested I remove another belt from the baler and we measure it to get my baler's belt's length. Back across town and rush hour traffic. Traffic was so bad I had to wait for a green light in order to turn right.
I removed the belt next to the broken belt. The left side of the hook pin - which was next to the open space of the missing belt broke off when I tried to pull it out. I had to remove the hook pin to the right. Against the other belt, and, oh, I am left handed. I had 3/4 of the pin removed when the pin broke off. It was very difficult but I finally got the entire pin removed and the belt off the baler.
I tried a different road around Kalispell. Traffic was bad that way also. The dealership closed at 5:30 pm and it was now 5:35 pm. The repair guy stayed after work to help me.
We measured the second belt. It was an inch shorter than the broken belt. What?!
When the broken belt had come off it ruined the lacing. So that had to be redone. Which meant trimming a few inches on each side of the belt in order to put new laces. I decided to add the short section. It wouldn't be the 10 inches but would add three or four inches to the belt's length. I could always trim the length if too long.
The repair department manger also stayed as the repair guy could not write up the work order when the repair was done. He helped with the repair to make it go quicker. The adding of new laces is time consuming and labor intensive. Especially since the tool they had was for 6 inches. That meant they had to do it twice, and to count the number of lace pins correctly so they would match the other side's pins. The pins have a long and short side and they had to be matched. Here is an example of what they lace pins look like.
One sets the pins in a 'tool'....
and then uses a vice to squeeze the tool and force the lace pins through the belt.
It took the three of us two hours to repair the belt. The cost of my repair: $418. About $56 for the lace pins, lace hooks, and belt. About $361 for labor. The dealership charges $125 an hour for labor. My belt is no longer carried or sold by John Deere but one can buy a new aftermarket belt for $471.
Crazy.
Back home I tried to install the belt I had taken off the baler to measure. That belt was now short by about 3 or 4 inches. What?! I had the tension released on the baler. What happened? I then remembered that Wyatt helped me untwist a severely twisted belt last year, we used his tractor to pull on my baler's spring tensioner to reduce even more of the tension. I got a jack and used it to push on the tension roller. I was getting my missing space back. One more crank and I can put the lace hook in and secure the belt. The jack slipped off the roller. After a few more tries of jacking I got the belt laced and hooked.
Now on to the 'broken' belt. Well... now with the new piece the belt was a little too long. The belt I had replaced last year(?) was a touch loose and I could still bale hay. To cut the 12 inch belt and re-lace it would take too long. So I went with the belt being loose. The lace hooks for this belt (I had two as the dealership didn't have 12 inch lace hooks) were difficult to slide in and lace the belt. Eventually I got the hooks in and the belt laced.
It was after 9 pm now. I had lost 7 hours to the broken belt. I had to try and test the baler. It worked. Before dark I was able to go around 1 1/3 rows and make four bales. The next morning in better light I could see several bales were not entirely even. One side was a touch shorter. I think it is a result of the looser belt. It affects the other side of the bale. To compensate I learned to feed the hay in that side more than the other side and I would get a straight bale. When I have time in the off-season I will shorten those belts.
It was windy this morning and that made for light to no dew. I was able to start baling the hay at 8:45 am. I needed an early start as I pretty much had my whole field to bale before night.
As you can see in the following photo, it was windy. Some times the wind would blow/roll part of the windrows.
The sky was clear when I started. But as the day went on clouds appeared. Then early afternoon I saw rain to the north along the mountains. Just before 4 pm a rain cloud came overhead and it started to rain lightly. I had two hours of baling left to do but I stopped. It sprinkled lightly for 10 to 15 minutes. The sun came back out and I took a short nap in the tractor while I waited for it to dry.
It wasn't completely dry when I saw another rain cloud forming west of me and coming this way. This was a larger cloud and I wasn't sure if this was the start to solid rain. So I started baling again. I made one bale when it was started to sprinkle again. This time it only last 3 to 5 minutes. No rain clouds looked to be forming so I waited almost an hour and half for the hay to dry.
At 7 pm I started baling again. The hay was damp, but not wet. The temperature had dropped quite a bit by now so not much more drying would be happening. I finished baling around 9 pm. Rain clouds were again forming north of me.
I cleaned up the corners and elsewhere of slightly missed hay. I had a small starter core of hay in the baler. I didn't want to leave it in the baler so I tried to dump it out by the barn. But the hay core sat in the belts and would not come out. I had to use long pry bars, and after lots of effort I was able to finally pry the bale out of the baler and put that core in the barn.
I will have to count tomorrow in better light, but I think I made 56 bales. By far a record amount for my field. I was going to run out of baling twine so I had Donna run to the store for me in the early afternoon to buy more twine. I used it on the last half dozen bales.
It is raining tonight and the forecast is for rain for the next three or four days. So I had to finish baling by tonight. I made it and succeeded but the stress level the past two days has been high.
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