There are good harvest days when most everything goes well. There are also not-so-good days. Here’s my tale regarding one of the latter.
Aug. 26 started normal enough.
Sure, we had some problems to iron out with the combine, but that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the sight in the morning as we neared the field of lentils where we had been toiling the day before.
The combine and grain truck were on a high point of land easily visible from a distance, but the combine wasn’t where we’d left it. Rather than being in the field, it was parked in some unfarmable grassland beside the lentil field.
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Had someone moved it into this rough, hilly terrain as a joke? Had someone sabotaged the combine? Trouble of this sort is unusual for us. Neighbours are all highly supportive of each other.
Upon closer inspection, it was clear the combine had rolled backward out of the field and across an old fence line, finally coming to rest a few hundred yards from where it was initially parked.
The tubes on the air reel had raked the ground, showing a clear path for the runaway.
The night before, I had parked the combine on what I thought was a relatively level patch of ground so fluid levels could be checked in the morning. The table was left down, but I hadn’t pulled the park brake, never once thinking the combine could roll backward from this location.
No damage was done, but it could have been much worse. A slightly different path could just as easily have sent the combine over a hillside akin to a buffalo jump.
I still can’t believe it rolled backward so far from a nearly level start.
Surprises for the day were not over.
We filled a bin with lentils, and while folding the grain conveyor down to move to another bin, a loud snap could be heard. A bushing and hinge pin lay on the ground.
The pin on the end of the big lifting ram had moved sideways, but fortunately had not fallen out completely. With some messing around, everything was aligned and put back together.
The only lasting damage is a bruise and abrasion on my head from not ducking low enough during the reassembly.
I should have expected something else to go wrong because bad luck seems to happen in threes.
With just a swipe or two remaining in the big lentil field we’d been working on for far too long, the draper belts in the centre of the combine header burst into flame.
Fortunately, there were two of us in the field at the time, the combine had two on-board fire extinguishers and the truck that is set up for firefighting was nearby.
After some scary moments, we had the flames knocked down and then kept dowsing the smouldering draper belts as well as chaff build-up in the recesses of the combine.
As this is being written, we haven’t torn everything apart yet, but the two draper belts are obviously toast and probably the rollers underneath. My guess is that a bearing failed, became super hot and eventually ignited the belts.
It could have been very bad if a hydraulic hose had melted through. With a fire fuelled by oil, the entire combine might have been lost.
In all three incidents, we were lucky. I’m looking forward to a little less excitement as harvest continues.
