The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.
It was a busy week in the theater again. Shows the last two Saturday’s, but Spring Break next week, that will be a quiet week.
Not much happening on the farm. We survived the “blizzard” on Wednesday. Maybe two inches of snow, and I got a snow day meaning I had time to work in the shop and organize bolts. I did pull some wagons out last week. See the header photo. The seed wagon has a good flatbed top that I built 25 or 30 years ago. But the wheels and frame under it, technically, that’s the “running gear” are pretty wore out. I have a much newer running gear, with better tires that I reclaimed after disposing of an old chopper box that was junk when dad bought it new in 1980.
So here’s a long boring story about that!
When he first bought the chopper, blower, and wagons, in order to fill the silo’s by ourselves, it was probably the mid 1970’s. My brother helped Dad at first. When I got older, the best job for me, at 15 years old, was to run the chopper, leaving it to Dad to run the smaller tractor and pull the wagons home to unload. You’ll just have to trust me on that. It was actually safer in the big tractor just going around and around the fields, than it was pulling them home, hooking up the power take off (the PTO), unloading by the blower (the machine that blows the crop up the pipe into the silo) and running back out to the field. So, I did that. Dad had two chopper boxes: one being filled in the field, and one home being unloaded. Or on the path somewhere in between.
One box was 14’ long and was a used ‘Kasten’ brand box. The other was 16’ long, and old John Deere box. But it sat taller, and it wobbled more. And I guess I was afraid it was going to tip over, so I’d slow down in the chopper, and then the shear pins would snap off because the machine plugged up. Shear pins are a safety thing to prevent overloading the chopper, but evidently you can break them by driving too slow. I’m sure dad yelled at me to speed up, but I was nervous. Finally, in the interest of his sanity, he traded off the 16’ JD box for a 14’ Papec box. Doing a little internet research, the Papec company started in 1900 and looks like it had a pretty good product at first. But the chopper box they made in 1975 was cheaply made crap. I feel like it was always broken. I bought another used Kasten box in the mid 90’s. And eventually junked the Papec box, and now I have this running gear that was under it.
Chopping was a tough time. Chopping hay needed to be done in a timely manner and the the pipe going up the silo would sometimes plug up (on the hottest, most humid day of summer) and I remember being very angry while trying to get it unplugged. I remember telling Kelly one day there was 18 tires that could go flat while trying to chop. Kelly suggested that might be the wrong attitude. But it was true.
Which brings us back to the seed wagon top, which should be moved to the better running gear, and it will all be a much better ‘wagon’.
I remember dad swapping boxes and running gear. You jack up the box, put a 55-gallon barrel under the corners, pull out one set of wheels, and slip the other set underneath. Nothing too it.
I’m thinking I can lift the back end with the loader and chains, some blocks under the front corners, and Bob’s your uncle! There are two brackets on the front axle, and two on the back that secure the top from sliding around. Typically, we don’t bolt it tight, because it needs to be able to flex a bit, so we wrap a chain around it leaving it a little slack. That way it can flex a bit but not fall off.
I’ve been working on a show, opened this past Friday, called ‘She Kills Monsters’ by Qui Nguyen. It’s a show about the relationship between two sisters. One sister played ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ and the other sister is learning about the game as a way to get closer to her sister. It’s been a lot of fun to work on. It’s a great director, a great cast, an amazing stage manager who can figure out my light cues, and I have lots of smoke and haze and wiggling lights. I think I ended up with 155 light cues. That’s a pretty good number of cues for a 2-hour show. This isn’t even a musical. Many straight shows end up with 40 – 60 cues.
That last photo was me trying to get the smoke machine level adjusted right. This is clearly too much smoke. But isn’t it fun to see all the light beams!!
The bathroom is finally finished!
Almost!
It’s working, just waiting on shower glass yet, but the rest is done. It looks really nice.
Next week I’ll post the pre and post photos.
REMEMBER ROLLING DOWN HILLS AS A KID? WHEN IS THE LAST TIME YOU ROLLED ANYWHERE?
Trail Baboon 