A Bad Baler Day

Some days in the hayfield are definitely better than others. I should have known when I got the phone call halfway to the field. After I had hitched up the trailer and driven as far as the post office, Whit called to ask me to go back for the new cutting knives he'd recently ordered.

Usually we do schoolwork until about lunchtime, then I load up TBear and Sunny and we head out to the field to bale and pick up the hay. Whit goes ahead of us to rake it into wind-rows and grease all the machinery. My job is to drive the tractor with the temperamental baler, while Whit and TBear follow with the haywagon and pick up and stack the bales to bring back to the barn.

I turned around at the Y (in the road, not the "Y" as in YMCA) in Mt Vernon and went home again for the knives. The day would turn out to be a total bust. The boys and I spent a few hours hanging around the hayfield waiting for Whit to replace the knives. That job didn't take too long. Figuring out why they still weren't cutting properly took the rest of the afternoon. The worst part about a day like this is not so much the waiting as the thinking that the next adjustment is going to do the trick. Poor Whit.

Thinking it will be a quick fix, TBear (and Sunny) run the knives down to Whit just over the hill to the left here. We've already cut and baled this section. The new part to bale is on the right.

Okay, so maybe it's not such a quick fix after all.

But we're being so patient.

Whit is replacing the cutting knives on our 1959 International Harvester baler.

See all the hay 'pooped' out the back? The baler won't tie it into bales for some reason. Sigh.

The nice, new, not ours, John Deere tractor. (It belongs to our hay partner. They were hoping it would make the baling smoother with the constant PTO, instead of using my wonderful old Farmall H. It was a false hope.) Sunny loves trucks...and tractors too, apparently. : )
Hours later, we're still hanging around waiting on the baler. While I feed countless amounts of hay into the thing, Whit makes adjustments and fiddles with it, all to no avail this day. Meanwhile, TBear teaches Sunny how to cut things using a pair of wire cutters on some twine. Who needs preschool?! : )
The rest of this story is that we bagged baling this day, and went home around 4:30 or 5pm. The next morning Whit returned with calipers and started at page one, measuring and making every single adjustment to the manual's specification. He also wound up putting the old knives back on. He's investigating whether the new ones were the right size, or whatever, for it because they just plain wouldn't work. We were back in business by 2pm or so.

This field gives me poison ivy. Every time we've cut and baled a section, I get fresh patches of it on my forearms from wrist to elbow. I'm contemplating buying stock in Calagel.