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Life on the Farm
bjrogg:
Well now I’m getting somewhere. Turns out I had everything hooked up right but I didn’t realize that the new harness for the individual rows electric eyes was wired for Deere now instead of Dickey John like it use to be. Dickey John switches the positive and negative their plugs. I had to remove the old adapter harness’s.
I powered everything up and it showed the rows. I also reprogrammed my precession display for 18 rows.
I then had everything except row 13 eye info. A few more calls to one of my buddies and a bunch of trouble shooting and I determined one of the new harness's has a open circuit.
The maker of the harness is going to call me.
I’m getting closer though and feeling much better than last night
Bjrogg
bjrogg:
I was hoping that the company that made the wire harness would just send me a new one and I would send the defective one back.
That’s not how they wanted to do it though. They wanted me to do some more trouble shooting. I had already determined which harness was defective. Now they wanted me to remove the pins from the plugs to see if they had a simple problem with their crimp or a broken wire by the crimp. I have a tool to remove the pins and I pulled pin 13 out of one end and inspected it. It visually looked good. I still had open circuit between pins. I checked from pin to probing the wire just a inch or so from the crimped on pin. I had continuity there so that tells me the pin is crimped on properly.
Next I remove pin from plug on other end of harness. Once again I visually inspect it and it looks good. I check resistance between pins and circuit is still open. I check from pin to probing the wire a inch from the crimp and have continuity. Once again this is telling me the crimp is good. As unlikely as it seems, my new wire most have a break in it .
The technician I’m working with talks to his boss and they decide they want me to send this harness back so they can repair it and then send it back to me. I’m a little bummed as this is liking to take weeks. I’m really wanting to try everything out and see what other surprises I have. The harness is twice as long as I need. I’m very tempted to just cut it in half. See which half has good wire and wire plug on good half, but they don’t want me to do that.
They decide to have Ups pick up my package. It sits in my shop another 24 hours waiting to get picked up.
In the meantime we work on the combine, but we are running out of new part and it’s becoming a real problem getting them. Lots of stuff back ordered. Starting to get pretty nervous. We have most of our fertilizer on farm already in our storage tanks. Usually we have a lot of our chemicals on farm in in our storage to but this year we haven’t been able to get any yet. In fact they still haven’t been able to tell us what we will be able to get and have told us several things we won’t be able to get. Normally we have prepaid the majority of these inputs already. At this point we still can’t because of this.
After everyone else goes home I decide to work on a project. Our ups guy quite often comes about 7:00 or 8:00 pm. The first night he doesn’t show, but last night he did. He always likes seeing what I’m working on.
It’s a river cane shaft I’m straightening for a obsidian point I just finished. Guess I don’t have a picture of the shaft, but here’s the point. I like this shape for arrows
Bjrogg
chamookman:
Great looking Point BJ ! Hope to be able to Finally meet You at the New location Memorial Weekend. I spend alot of time with that Bruce B. character (lol) ! Bob
bjrogg:
Thanks Bob I really like Bruce and Cindy. They are really good people and made Susie and I feel right at home right from the first event we attended. We keep in contact. They even dropped by our shop a few years ago and dropped off two bear hides they decided to clean out of their freezer. I tanned one, but I haven’t found the time to tan the second one yet. That was a lot more work than I thought it would be. I’ll get the second one someday, but I can see it’s not going to be this winter.
Bjrogg
bjrogg:
I was hoping to test all my systems out and find anymore surprises, but now I have to wait for the defective harness to be fixed and returned.
This is how our row starter fertilizer was applied. We never liked this system. It’s supposed to put the fertilizer 2” to the side of seed and 2” below the seed. It doesn’t do a very good job of that. And we’ve tried tweaking it, but still weren’t satisfied.
Several years ago we tried mounting a knife behind one row like the second picture. It worked good, but the bracket we made was to light and bent. I could sure see that one row got off to a lot better start though.
We were going to try something on one row again, but since we have run out of parts we decided to go for broke and put them on all 18 rows while we wait for parts.
Hopefully they work. A lot of stuff happens in this 6 feet. Row cleaners clear trash and residue out of the path. Then the starter fertilizer is placed 2” to the side and two inches below where the seed will be planted. Then the meter drops the seed in seed trench made by two seed disks. The depth of the trench is controlled by the gauge wheels. Then some nylon plastic “seed formers” gently push the seed to bottom of trench and make sure seed has good soil contact. Then we spray a 3 1/2 inch “Tee band”
that goes in the trench and a inch to each side of it . We can use a very small amount of insecticide to protect our seeds from grubs, wire worms and seed corn maggots. We can cut our rate by 10x using the narrow Tee band. One problem with cover crops is that they are also a very good environment for harmful insects. Finally the closing wheels close the seed trench and light pack the ground to insure good seed to soil contact and consistent depth.
Bjrogg
PS I sure hope this is going to work. I’m a little nervous about switching them all without trying them out on one row first. We plant in a lot of different conditions and those conditions can have a huge effect on how something like this works
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