This morning I checked the last bale I made the previous evening. A typical bale is straight across. Not this bale.
Let's look at the baler. Hmmm...that's odd.
I checked the front rollers and again they were wrapped with hay when they shouldn't be. I spent a long time cutting and removing this hay from the rollers. In the following photos you should see the rollers and no hay.
Once the hay was removed from the baler rolls, I checked one of the side panels. I found one hydraulic hose to the mechanism that opens and closes the back gate had a leak. The hose has a slow drip from where the rubber goes into the metal end. I forgot to take a larger photo of the area. The hose is 8 feet long and is threaded here and there between two connections. It took a long time to remove the hose. I called the local John Deere dealership to see if they stocked this hose but got no call back. It is Friday and I couldn't wait longer. I went to a local machine shop that also deals with hydraulic hoses and they made me a new hose. It cost me $50. When I went to reinstall the new hose I found the new hose was about 4 inches longer. Usually that is not a problem but this area has lots of moving parts and chains and no real extra room. I worked at it and an inch here and an inch there, etc. and I got the hose to finally fit.
So I didn't start baling hay until 3 pm. The first bale got a tear in the middle of the net wrap when I unloaded the bale. I'll have to add a little twine when I later move the bale. But no hay on the rollers.
The second bale caught one end of the net wrap in the baler. Not too bad. Probably won't have to add twine to the bale when I move it. Again, no hay on the rollers. Lots of loose chaff from the hay.
The third bale. I can roughly tell how long it takes to net wrap a bale. For this bale it was going on longer. Once before this happened, and once I stopped the PTO, then restarted the PTO the monitor reset and stopped the wrapping. Not this time. Each time I restarted the PTO the wrapping continued. So I unloaded the bale from the baler. Lots of extra wrapping was around the bale. The wrapping went from the hay bale back into the baler's belts. I had to cut the wrapping between the bale and baler. To remove the wrapping from the belts I had to cut the wrapping back at the net wrap roll and then pull out the wrapping from the belts. Then I had to reset the wrapping to start back in the initial rollers.
Because things are acting wierd lately I decided to check engaging the PTO to run the belts without picking up any hay. I found the belts were taking the net wrap from the roll of net wrap. I had to cut and remove it again. This time I tested the PTO and belts without any net wrap in the initial rollers. Over and over again the initial rollers would rotate. The monitor had said the net wrap was done, but the mechanism didn't know that. It was after 5 pm on a Friday. The John Deere dealership closed at 5:30 pm so I called them for advice. He had me check a few things. I learned about the net wrap actuator. It was still enabled. His work around to reset the actuator did not work for me. The only other suggestion was to check the voltage. The connections seemed fine. My neighbor Curtis wasn't around who could show me how to check the voltage. So in the meantime I read the baler's manual for ideas. There was a description on how to use the monitor to check the actuator's voltage. That didn't seem to work the way the manual described in how I would get a reading. But what happened was the actuator then began to work and it reset to normal. I checked and the initial net wrap rollers no longer operated when I was just running the belts and not wrapping a bale. Good. I reset the net wrap in the initial rollers. It was now time to move my irrigation pipes. So tomorrow I'll see if things are back to working normally. And if so, then what will be my new strange problem as I get a new problem every day.
I should have been done baling my field in less than 2 days, but after 3 days I only have half the field baled, and each day I make less hay bales. When will this strangeness end?
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