I'll preface this with: I'm neither whining nor asking for sympathy.
Son had been gone on an 8 day trip with his spouse, got home Saturday night, and expected(as usual) that everything he wanted to do would fall into place like balls on a pool table. When he left, we had 3 disfunctional tractors-- one waiting on an ordered part, one that was put away last summer with an electrical issue, and one he'd loaned out and left dead in the borrower's field 4 hours later. I was not able to resolve any of those issues while he was away which didn't help anything at all.
We had a few acres of corn to plant for a customer which doesn't seem to be a problem except for the fact that we'd never planted corn with the planter we bought 6 years ago. Since I'd not had much experience with John Deere planters, I had no basis to work from. Yesterday morning we switched the seed meters from soybeans to corn--simple enough. Went to the field and stuff started going wrong. Seems there's a little synthetic rubber seed delivery belt thing-a-ma-bob in there that apparently doesn't like sitting in storage for years at a time. Being the packrat he is, Son had a whole stack of spare meters(all of which had been sitting for years-keep this in mind) so he sent for those (35 mile round trip). When they arrived in what seemed like hours, it wasn't a direct replacement swap. Both units had to be dismantled, parts swapped, one re-assembled, and remounted onto the planter. First one(keep this in mind) took about 15 minutes. Good to go?? NO.
Over the next 3 hours, 7 of those little rubber belt thingies broke which breaks the plastic gear drive and requires another sequence to replace(some of them broke a second time). We did get much faster at changing parts and DIL timed us at 5 minutes after we'd practiced some. By the time we'd planted about 5 acres, we ran out of salvage parts and it was getting dark so we gave up.
Someone is headed for a JD parts counter this morning.
Son had been gone on an 8 day trip with his spouse, got home Saturday night, and expected(as usual) that everything he wanted to do would fall into place like balls on a pool table. When he left, we had 3 disfunctional tractors-- one waiting on an ordered part, one that was put away last summer with an electrical issue, and one he'd loaned out and left dead in the borrower's field 4 hours later. I was not able to resolve any of those issues while he was away which didn't help anything at all.
We had a few acres of corn to plant for a customer which doesn't seem to be a problem except for the fact that we'd never planted corn with the planter we bought 6 years ago. Since I'd not had much experience with John Deere planters, I had no basis to work from. Yesterday morning we switched the seed meters from soybeans to corn--simple enough. Went to the field and stuff started going wrong. Seems there's a little synthetic rubber seed delivery belt thing-a-ma-bob in there that apparently doesn't like sitting in storage for years at a time. Being the packrat he is, Son had a whole stack of spare meters(all of which had been sitting for years-keep this in mind) so he sent for those (35 mile round trip). When they arrived in what seemed like hours, it wasn't a direct replacement swap. Both units had to be dismantled, parts swapped, one re-assembled, and remounted onto the planter. First one(keep this in mind) took about 15 minutes. Good to go?? NO.
Over the next 3 hours, 7 of those little rubber belt thingies broke which breaks the plastic gear drive and requires another sequence to replace(some of them broke a second time). We did get much faster at changing parts and DIL timed us at 5 minutes after we'd practiced some. By the time we'd planted about 5 acres, we ran out of salvage parts and it was getting dark so we gave up.
Someone is headed for a JD parts counter this morning.
