[AJD] Not asking for advice, just need to vent...

[David Ransom]

When we were getting the baler ready, the chain that drives the pickup tines came off a gear.  We put it back on and went to baling hay.  The chain came off.  We put it back on, and it came off again, this time with a broken link.  My father and my brother replaced the broken link with one from an old junker and the baler started working okay, the chain staying on.  We went to mowing some hay.  The mower broke a chain.  We went to the NH dealer and got two new links (one for a spare) and also some other less desparately needed items including a tine for the tedder (which we have not yet used this year).  [I could tell a few stories about that tedder, but they don't really fit here.]

We were baling hay a few days ago, and the baler (IH 46) was working just fine which was highly unusual.  However, when it ran out of string, it started missing most, but not all of the right knots (more the way it usually works).  My brother said he thought one of the needles was a millimetre or two off from where he thought it would be.  My father adjusted it a little, and the baler tied two knots, and then missed one (two out of three is much better than usual), but then my father adjusted the needle a bit more, and, without testing it by hand, engaged the PTO.  Instead of dunk-dunk-da-dunk, it went dunk-dunk-drrrung, and the right needle hit something riveted on the top of the bale chamber, breaking two rivets and bending the needle.

The rivets were replaced, and my father tried to straighten the needle, then had his cousin straighten it and weld it where it broke.  He put it back in, and we baled about a hundred more bales.  Then, the needle hit again.  We called the IH dealer, who said he had one in stock, not sure if it was the correct one.  We went down and looked at it.  It did not match the one we took down to compare, because...

It turns out both needles were off.  So, my brother and I went back and got 2 new needles, for $380.  We tried to install them, but they wouldn't go on at the right angle.  It could have been that the cradle (the thing like a crankshaft that holds the needles) was bent, or the new needles were wrong, or possibly something else.  After a few brief minutes of trying to get them in the baler, without really studying why they weren't going on, my father rushed them back to the dealer, who gave him my brother's and my money back, minus a $55 restocking fee, to ship the needles back to the warehouse.  I kept asking him in the store if he was sure, and trying on the rare occasions I could get a word in to ask about other possible problems.  The dealer asked if the pivots for the cradle were in the wrong place.  I tried to ask if this was possible (when we got back found out not), and also tried to ask about the possibility of replacing the cradle.

My father then took the sledgehammer face of a splitting maul to the needls, bending one and breaking the other.  He then spent several hours playing with a worthless contraption he calls a welder, which makes the lights in the house flicker and turns wire into a bunch of rough gobs, but, unlike his cousin's welder, does not actually weld.  While this was going on, my brother got a reply to his post on yt, specifically one saying that new needles from IH should work and the cradle was probably twisted.  My mother (who can never be pried away from her computer long enough to help move a hay bale anyway) seems to think it's all my fault and has been snapping at me about it all evening, after yelling at my father for not making sure it was in working order back in the winter (it was; my father didn't wreck it by engaging the pto without first hand testing the needles until a few days ago!).

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

What's for tommorow?

a:\ Will my father have one of his friends destroy the cradle (perhaps with the new needles back in it) with an acetylene torch?

b:\ Will the IH dealer charge $200 for us to get the needles back (They weren't going to ship them to the warehouse until next week, but will they, and will it matter?)?

c:\ Will my father take the needles straight back to the dealer right after getting them back without even trying again?

d:\ Will I live through tomorrow?

e:\ Will my other brother (a tractor trailer driver who only comes around every month or two, and who happens to have a lot of money in the bank) come around, see what's going on, and buy a brand new baler and a new tractor to go with it, causing this baler, which is mostly in good shape and probably fixable, to go to waste?

The year is already off to a depressing start for other reasons; four old cows died, probably of old age, and another cow, whom I (and apparently not the rest of the family) consider sort of special for having adopted and raised an orphaned calf a few years back, has cancer in her left eye and will probably be next.

Hopefully things are going better for most of you.