This has been a pretty random week. Right now, as I sit here writing this blog, Candice is baking an apple pie while we listen to people waltz on the radio. Quite how you are supposed to work out what is going on whilst two people waltz on the radio, I do not know, but if I find out I will share it.
Tuesday, we sat down and stared at our VERY last dollar. (below)
But! Not a problem!
We were sitting in a trailer on Bill's land. Bill, an awesome guy whose family have been on the land pretty much 200 years, has given us some work for a few weeks and a place to stay. The license plate reads: "DA SLUM". Sweet trailer: lots of space, large bed, kitchen, fridge, shower; all life's luxuries!
Spent the day collecting large branches off the floor. [Note: Willows are awesome trees. If you like firewood, have a few. If you hate branches scattered all over the ground, don't]
The next day I was moving bails of hay. 200+ bails of hay. Stops being fun and starts to feel like a workout/work really quickly!
On Thursday I learnt how a hay bailing machine works, mainly cos Bill's bailer is busted, and we had to work out how to fix it in the 'duct tape and a hammer fixes all' kind of way, to save spending unnecessary money on it.
A bailer is pulled along a line of hay on the ground by a tractor. The machine picks up the hay and pushes it down into a box shaped section that squashes the hay into the required size/weight box. Twine is wrapped around the bail by large feeding pins and these funky little plier shaped chrome pincers make a knot out of the two ends of the twine. The bailer keeps pushing more hay in, and this pushes the completed bail out the back. Simple. But as all the working parts are powered from one cog turning to three cogs, turning to eight cogs, etc, etc; it's simplicity is amazingly complicated.
Bill had needed to weld the twine feeding pins back together (them snapping in half being the main reason why the machine didn't work in the first place). Replacement pins for this bailer cost $125 each. With the pins welded just off centre, one of them broke again the minute we kicked the bailer into life. No progress that day.
Friday, with the pin re-welded, we made sure they would fit, using a hammer to aline the bracket. It was a lovely, sweet, tight fit. Perfect. We started up the machine, and pulled it with a tractor, over the hay.
PING!
A brace bolt snaps on the cogs that lead on to it making a knot, and we don't have any the right size to replace it. A brace bolt is like an electrical fuze. It holds two main cogs together and if any part of the machine is jammed and under pressure, the bolt snaps, severing the connection to the motor, rather than the machine causing itself thousands of dollars damage.
No worries, we fix this using a nail that we bend on each side of the cogs to hold them in place. Breaking up this fun escapade was filled with a little bit of cow herding in a pickup truck. [Note: Cows in a herd are easy to control and maneuver, but an individual is a really large, fucking stupid animal]
We start the machine back up and watch everything move and spin without anything breaking. Progress. Hay goes in, pieces whirr, hay forms a box shape with twine wrapped round it, but no knot in the twine. The timing is off; the second piece of twine was reaching the first piece after the knot had been tied. We decided to go back and look at the ancient instruction booklet, pick up various sizes of brace bolt (we''ll probably need them) and grab some lunch.
After lunch we decided to switch on the machine and shut it off just as the pins fired up the twine to tie the knot. This way we would know by how much the timing was off. Bill headed off to herd the cows, again, whilst I sprayed down all the cogs of the knot tying section with WD-40, especially the knot tying pincers, just to make sure they didn't stick. When Bill got back he started up the tractor and I watched the moving parts as it rolled forward. Almost immediately the pins shot up and the bailer stopped. I was left thinking Bill had got the timing perfect and had shut the machine off at exactly the right moment.
No such luck. The pins had both jammed and snapped in the same place where they had first broken and two brace bolts had snapped.
Bill sighed and looked at me, "That's it. I'm not tinkering with this anymore. It's time to get out 'The Beast'."
'The Beast' was an older, larger version of the bailer we had been trying to fix. So much bigger and older, it had it's own engine. We managed to get it out from under the shed really easily and positioned it in front of the garage to charge the dead battery. After trying to start it a few times, with it not turning over, we worked out that something must be wrong with the starter motor or a piston in the engine. Bill decided that was it for the day, he was going to get some sleep and think about the engine over the weekend.
Week of work over, $200 better off, me and Candice took off for another 'fun' experience in Wal-Mart, Helena.
On Saturday, as per our invitation, we headed off to a mine, owned by some peeps we met the week before, for a barbecue. No BBQ happening there, but we sat down inside, out of the heat and had a few bowls and beers. I found out that their water pump had broken, so they were out of water, and we offered to help them out any way we could. In what seems to be the 'Montana Way', rather than paying someone to come and fix it, he wanted to pull the pump out the ground himself. All 200 feet of it. Five of us, one hour, a ladder and a lot of pulling later, we had the pump out. We left them before dark, a few beers and bowls later, and a complimentary bag heavier.
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