$.67 = $260

During my yearly baler maintenance last week, I found a couple of broken bolts on my JD 567 pickup where they go through the pickup cam. I guess somebody rammed through some gopher mounds at high speed last fall and broke things loose. Anyway, I pulled the pickup group apart and replaced the broken hex bolts and put it back together. No problem. I ran the baler to make sure that all was well and when I got down out of the tractor to looked at the baler running at speed, I noticed that chunks of the cam were now laying on the shop floor and the pickup was jumping around! I took everything apart again and wouldn't you know, someone put a hex bolt though the wrong direction where a standard bolt should have gone, and it was in from the wrong direction. So a $0.67 bolt caused $260.00 dollars worth of damage. Okay so it wasn't the bolt that caused the damage it was the maintenance man's fault (which is me) for putting the wrong bolt in the wrong place in the wrong direction. After that mess I gave the maintenance man the rest of the day off. It's hard to find a good mechanic these days.