Farm Blog

This years winter equipment maintenance that we do in my brother Tim's shop seems to be taking forever.  We started with our John Deere 567 round baler.  A couple seasons ago I noticed that the slip clutch was locked tight and wasn't slipping when it should have.  The slip clutch protects the baler from breaking parts when the baler encounters a jam.  I noticed that when I encountered a jam the belts would jam but the baler kept going.  Not good!  During last winter's equipment maintenance we freed the slip clutch but then again we had a performance issue during this 2010 season where the clutch slipped too much and toward the end of the hay season I was spending too much time unblocking jams in the baler.  Long story short, we ended up taking the slip clutch apart and sure enough, the slip clutch parts were bad.  Once this was fixed we continued going through the baler in serious detail and anything that we found out of spec was correct.  It seems like we are at Deere every weekday picking up some small part here and some sub part there.  Sharon is talking about running the numbers on the hay again to see how much profit is left after all of this "preventative" maintenance.  I also decided this year to replace my Farmex moisture tester with a Delmhorst moisture tester, and to integrate it into my JD 567 round baler.  Easier said than done it would seem.  I'm not sure if I'm the first one to do this, or the first one that Delmhorst tech support has encountered.  After posting lots of pictures and information onto farm chat forums and coming up with a goose-egg, I resorted to calling someone who uses the same moisture tester in a chem applicator on the JD 567.  They knew what I needed and soon after Delmhorst tech support called and let me know that they also saw what my problem was and contacted me with their solution.  So now I wait for the part that is guaranteed to solve my problem to arrive by UPS.  While waiting we moved the 567 out and pulled the JD 4440 tractor in for its winter maintenance.  That is still in process and I think I found a leak in the radiator.  I'll be going up to Tim's shop with George to pull the front hood off to take a closer look this morning.  There are a few more items on the list for the 4440 but the radiator maybe an unexpected issue that leads to other things.  Better now than in the field while I'm baling is what its all about.