The Life of a Custom Mowing contractor

[ning]

When you say “hopefully for their sake”, what about my sake?
People want to live in “farm country” and complain about tractors on the road. What’s up with that?

Trust me, last thing I want is an accident with a car, because the police blame the trucker or farmer, no matter what.

A farmer buddy of mine got into an accident with a car driven by an attractive female and she put on a real show for the male state trooper.

Yet according to the law, despite all the beacons, flashers, SMV triangles, and headlights, I have just as much right to that road as they do.

I meant, they're in for a good surprise and I'd expect they need to back up to get to a spot you can get around - my apologies but I didn't intend this to be taken as a negative to you.

Hopefully you run dash cams that have a view of the road next to your tires so you can show that you're in your lane - it ultimately comes down to the judge and potentially jury and if you can show evidence that would be helpful, regardless of what the police think at the scene, though you'd definitely rather it not come down to that. But, when the car driver's making a fuss, you can always say "hey I've got video showing what happened, and it's still running, do you really want to be lying on camera?"

 

[Hay Dude]

Seems like you get more use out of the land than they do!

They just want to travel, entertain, and keep about 350 acres of farm land around their property.
I’m more than happy to oblige

 

[Hay Dude]

Just when I thought I was going to coast across the finish line, something happened.
I was baling away today. Got 40 bales made, was just about to finish up for the day.

Here’s me raking earlier-

And some baling later. You can see a bale up and to the right that fell into the weeds.

I quickly got 40 bales tied and was looking forward to leaving around 5 and head home for the Phillies/Dodgers game.

Had just one mis-tie, and then I got an alert that the greaser was out of grease.
Kind of a PITA to reload in the field. You have to load individual typical grease tubes into a special “plunger” device from Krone, open a cap on the greaser, and load about 6-10 tubes of grease into it.
I typically load the greaser without shutting the baler down. Each shut down and restart increases chance of something breaking. I have learned this from many years of baling.
Anyway, while loading the greaser up, it started spitting grease out of the relief valve.

In other words, one of the dozens and dozens of greaser lines is plugged.

Tomorrow will be a long day of pulling lines and looking for back pressure. Not looking forward to it. I hope I can get it resolved quickly, and finish 2025 up before the rains come.

 

[LouNY]

Those nice multi point lubers are great when working right and none of the lines have broken off at the delivery point or in between. Then you often don't catch it till a bearing starts squealing.

 

[Hay Dude]

Those nice multi point lubers are great when working right and none of the lines have broken off at the delivery point or in between. Then you often don't catch it till a bearing starts squealing.

I think I caught it somewhat early. No noises, yet. And hopefully none coming.

 

[Rustyiron]

Good luck with that job today HD.
Auto/self greasing device, does it just periodically push grease into a common "manifold" type set up the delivers to every line or are there multiple "circuits" like for larger and smaller bearings that require different amounts of grease?
No matter what, I imagine that you're occasionally needed effort to keep it in order is far shorter than manually greasing it every time.
I hope you find the culprit in the first few that you check!

 

[Hay Dude]

Good luck with that job today HD.
Auto/self greasing device, does it just periodically push grease into a common "manifold" type set up the delivers to every line or are there multiple "circuits" like for larger and smaller bearings that require different amounts of grease?
No matter what, I imagine that you're occasionally needed effort to keep it in order is far shorter than manually greasing it every time.
I hope you find the culprit in the first few that you check!

Yes it has a few manifolds. A knotter manifold, a plunger bearings manifold and a pickup reel manifold plus a few others on the axles and pickup reel casters, etc.

I’m trying to think of a strategy of where to start removing lines. Going to be a potentially tough wrenching day…

 

[Rustyiron]

My question was partially considering how to eliminate or identify the manifold that triggered the relief valve to pop somewhere isolating the problem location.