Starting to bale Donna's hay. Problems.

I want to be done with haying right now.  For my field: haybine problem after problem. Baler ok.  Donna's field.  Haybine ok.  Baler problems.

I thought I would get her hay baled today, or at least most of it.  I made only 5 bales.  Nowhere close to even half the field.

I got a later than normal start.  First thing in the morning is to move irrigation pipes.  Tonight's irrigation pipe move now has the south line at the end valve.  The north end still has two valves to go.  I have passed where the turkey is laying under the power line tower.  A few days ago I checked and the turkey was laying there.  Its eye was open and its head was up.  Maybe still alive.  It lays the exact same way each time.  Then last night the line went right by the turkey.  It was still there.   This morning the turkey was still there even though everything around was wet.  The turkey is alive.  I saw the head move and one eye blink this morning when I got close to check if it was still alive.  Why it stays there is a mystery to me.

I had to get more diesel from the gas station.   I also am trapping pocket gophers as I can now see the mounds after the hayfield was cut.  I have trapped 11 gophers so far.

Last night: four hours of sleep.  Four hours of moving irrigation, getting gas, trapping gophers.  Then two more hours of sleep until Donna called me at 12:30 pm to ask if I was going to bale her hay today.  Yes, because I want to be done.

The haybine.  The first two bales went fine.  The third bale wouldn't stop netwrapping.  I dumped the bale and hand cut the netwrap and reset the actuator (hydraulic jack) that should cut the netwrap.  The fourth bale went fine.  The fifth bale wouldn't stop netwrapping.  I dumped the bale and hand cut the netwrap and reset the actuator.   But this time I noticed the second baler belt was partially under the first belt.  An empty baler and the belt still wouldn't move back to normal by itself.  So I had to move the belt by hand.  Not easy, but after rocking the belt back and forth and pulling, eventually I got it back to its normal location.

Then I noticed the first belt was twisted a few times.  How the belt can twist between the rollers is a major mystery.  Last year my baler problems started when the belt twisted.  Curtis had to help me and eventually we had to unpin the belt's lacing to fix the problem as we couldn't untwist the belt by hand.  This year I knew unpinning the belt's lacing was how I would fix this problem.   But the pin and lacing was in the twist, and next to a roller.  No way to unpin the belt.  I was able to use the tractor's PTO to move the belt so the lacing and pin was midway between the rollers, even it was at the very top of the baler.

I got a ladder from Donna and climbed up to unpin the lacing.  But the twist had broken the pin into four sections.  And the twisting has made the belt very tight. I had to use a vicegrip to pull the end of the outside pin sections from the lacing.  A plier wouldn't work.   With a vicegrip I could rotate the pin back and forth as I pulled on it.  I had to work and work and work and work on pulling the outside pin sections.  Finally I got each out.

The two inner pin sections were inside the lacing.  I couldn't use a vicegrip to grab the pin sections.  I had to use a small punch to try to force the sections out.  After a bit I got the smaller pin section to fall out.  The last pin section was inside the middle 8 laces.  I couldn't get the pin section to move.  I could only pound the pin one way, not from either end due to where the belt was located.  I tried this and that and that and this and that.  I spent hours trying to get the section out.  Then I thought of trying to drill the pin from the laces.  The pin, while it would break into sections, was hard and would not drill.  I broke two drill bits.  When I could drill.  Donna's long extension cord, while it looked fine and new, didn't want to work.  One would have to hold the cord connections tightly together.  It took effort to figure out which cord was bad.  Donna had to find another extension cord.  It was one thing after another to make a bad situation worse.

It was bad situation to try to pound the pin out of the laces.  Finally I got enough it out where I could grab the end of the pin with a vicegrip to pull the rest of the pin out.  The belt came apart and it wasn't hard to pull the belt through a few rollers and untwist the belt and put the belt back through the rollers.   The belt is not tight in this position and I could easily put the belt against itself.  Now to get a new pin.  Last year when I had to re-pin the belt with Curtis I bought three pins.  Now to find where I put the other two pins after I fixed the belt last year.

By the time I finally unpinned the belt it was past time to move my irrigation pipes in the evening.  Maybe tomorrow I will get Donna's hay baled and can finally be done with haying for now.

Of course my day's problems were not over.  When I almost done moving the second irrigation line I saw that the backup line had a geyser going on.  I finished the second line so I could use it while I closed the backup line in order that I could fix the geyser.  In the past geysers were when the sprinkler head popped off.  I bought the wrenches that would fit.  I also brought a pipe wrench.  Good thing I did because the geyser was not because the sprinkler came off, but because the riser pipe holding the sprinkler unscrewed itself from the sprinkler pipe.  The wrenches were too small to screw the riser back into the pipe.  The pipe wrench worked.

I checked my pocket traps.  Caught one.  Then when I went to look north of the mainline where I had seen a pocket gopher dirt mound as the start of my irrigation earlier this week, I couldn't find the dirt mound.  I know there was a mound north of the line as that was the only mound I had seen north of the mainline.  Most new mounds were closer to the south hayfield fence where the gophers come from the neighbors' fields.  Once in a while a gopher will go a long distance to move to a location away from the other gophers.  Over and over I walked and looked.  I gave up as it was getting dark.  This day had gone downhill and I want to go to bed and for this day to be over.

Top of the baler and the lacing with the broken pins holding the belt together.

One of the belt twists. How the lacing looked when it was at this location.

The last piece of pin to remove, and was the hardest to remove.