[AT] Fun with the manure spreader

[Cecil Bearden]

Dean:
I have a Belarus that has a foot lever 25% reduction.  It will catch 
halfway and be in neutral.   You can't just look at it and know it is 
not in gear.  Getting in and out of the cab it will sometimes  get 
kicked and knocked out of gear.  Then when you start up, nothing.  
Especially bad when a new operator is working and freaks out when 
something happens.  Most operators around here have a bad attitude 
toward a Belarus to start with, and that doesn't help.   After a couple 
of days of running one, and they begin to really appreciate how they are 
built...

Cecil


On 11/15/2017 7:45 PM, Dean Vinson wrote:
>> Winter hogs in the barn and manure spreader made for some long Saturdays
> Paul, that takes me back about 40 years.   While in high school I worked for
> a dairy farmer, who'd had a pretty nice dairy barn:  Maybe 40 milking
> stanchions in two facing rows with a center aisle for the silo unloader and
> grain cart, and a manure trough/chain around the outside that then ran up a
> ramp outside the barn and over the spot where we'd park the spreader.  But
> he'd grown tired of the relentless dairy schedule and eventually sold his
> cows, tore out the milking equipment, and converted to hogs.   Compared to
> relatively minor manure cleanup around the trough, which had been the
> routine with the cows, I had to clean the entire area with a scraper and
> manually shove all the manure out to the edges and into the trough.
> Besides all the additional effort it was just a very different consistency
> and of course almost all manure and no straw.   Didn't work nearly as well
> with the manure chain.
>
> And then of course came winter, as you mentioned.  The manure chain was
> driven by an electric motor turning a big sprocket at the very end of the
> unloading ramp outside the barn, and every now and then the chain would come
> off the sprocket and the whole thing would stop.   Climbing up that hog-crap
> covered ramp with some wrenches and a pry bar or whatever, in the frigid
> January wind, and hanging out over the edge of the ramp to wrestle that
> chain back onto the sprocket, makes for kind of an entertaining memory now
> but was much less fun at the time.
>
>> I didn't mind forking manure too bad growing up but I did hate walking 25'
> with each fork-full to get to the spreader...
>
> Farmer, I didn't have that particular experience but we did do all
> barn-cleaning and spreading by hand:   Kids and pitchforks in the barn
> pitching onto the old single-axle wagon, then out in the field pitching it
> back off the wagon.   Seems like we got pretty good at pitching the stuff
> quite some distance while spreading, to minimize the walking but also to
> avoid having to stop so often (and slow down the ordeal) to move the tractor
> and wagon.
>
>> I hope you had a front end loader to load the spreader with. That is a
>> lot of hand labor to load with a manure fork!!
> Cecil, yep, I was living large...loaded it all with my trusty little Kubota
> BX2370, and then fired up the Super M to go spread it.   Didn't so much as
> touch a pitchfork.  :)
>
> I did have one related (mis)adventure, though.   That Kubota is a workhorse
> but still just a little machine, and for almost four years now I've used the
> living daylights out of it.  All the finish mowing but also light-duty
> brushhogging when it seems more convenient than going to get one of the real
> tractors and the brushhog, and lots and lots of loader work:   80 tons of
> riprap, huge quantities of dirt and mulch, countless loads of firewood,
> shoving in the ends on dozens of giant burnpiles, all the zillion chores
> that you can find for a front loader even if you only have a little one.
> At the start of this year I realized it'd go over 400 hours and therefore
> need some shop servicing to tend to the heavy stuff listed in the
> maintenance schedule, but I'd hoped it would wait until after some frosts so
> I wouldn't have to worry about mowing grass while it was in the shop.  No
> such luck, 400 hours came and went sometime over the summer, and I just kept
> running it.   Kept the usual eye on fluid levels and such but had some worry
> that I was pushing my luck, especially with the heavy use.    So then of
> course I bought the manure spreader and started into that giant pile of
> manure, loading that spreader up over and over.
>
> One day I went out to make some more progress on the manure pile, started up
> the Kubota and went to back out of the shed, lifting the mower deck as I
> went, and all of a sudden it just stopped dead in its tracks, wouldn't move
> forward or backward.   Engine sounded fine, loader worked fine, but the
> pedals felt mushy and weird and the tractor wouldn't move at all.   So I
> consulted Google, which led me to assorted webpages explaining the
> limitations of these relatively light-duty machines and the risks of
> overheating the transmission fluid, etc.   Dadgummit, they got my number.
> So I called the local farm equipment dealership where I'd bought the thing
> from to begin with, and they came out and winched it up onto a truck and
> hauled it off to the shop.
>
> A few days later I talked to the service manager, dreading the bad news and
> the size of the repair bill, and he explained the problem:   Evidently while
> raising the mower deck I'd bumped the hi-lo range lever into neutral, and
> turns out it works way better if you put it in a range that involves motion.
>
> Dean Vinson
> Saint Paris, Ohio
>
>
>
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