fitzw | Busy two days

We have one customer who likes a mix of first and second cutting (rowen). We currently are taking the first cutting hay from the east side of the barn, where we have a hay elevator (closer to an escalator, actually) that can hook directly onto the side of the truck. We keep the hay elevator there until we run out of hay on that side, and then we move it to the other side (it's heavy -- we don't like to move it any more often than we absolutely have to).

The rowen is all in the first three mows on the west side, with no hay elevator, and that hay has to be carried by hand out of the mow onto the loading platform.

Yesterday, that customer asked for 60 bales of hay, 30 of first cutting and 30 of second cutting. I normally will count the hay in the mow and stack it, either close to the loading platform on the west side or close to the bottom of the elevator on the east side. For this entry, I'll call that the "first move" of the hay.

For the "second move" of the hay, I do the stacking in the truck now, and my father moves the hay from those initial stacks either onto the elevator on the east side, which will deliver it right into the truck, or onto the tailgate on the west side.

That's what we did last night. As we were leaving the barn, though, my father noticed that there was a wet trail in some loose hay on the loading platform in front of the truck. A quick inspection under the truck found that it had a leak somewhere, which we traced to a small hose that had come off of a metal pipe under the truck. The liquid was oily and odorless, and I suspected that it was either hydraulic fluid (for the dump body and the plow attachment), or transmission fluid (the truck has an automatic transmission). I reattached the hose to the pipe, but since it was getting pretty cold, we decided to wait until the morning to check the fluid levels.

This morning, we checked the regular oil level (fine), and started the truck to warm it up to check the transmission fluid level. I couldn't get a reading on the dipstick for the transmission fluid. I also found what appeared to be a second leak under the dump body, but I didn't check that leak too closely to find out what kind of fluid it was -- I figured it was similar to the leak that we had discovered the previous night.

We couldn't check the level of the hydraulic fluid because the reservoir is underneath the center of the dump body, and you have to raise the dump body to get at it (which requires hydraulics to lift). Not the greatest of designs, that...

Since it's pretty dark in the barn when it's cloudy (which it was this morning), we decided to bring the truck down out of the barn to get a better look at things. However, the truck would not move. At all. Well, maybe it would back up about 3 inches, but it certainly wouldn't go forward.

Which led me to the conclusion that it was, indeed, the transmission fluid that had been leaking under the front of the truck. I still didn't know what the leak was under the back of the truck.

My brother, R, said that he would send down his man G to help if he could. The plan was to try to get our truck running, and if we couldn't, we would load the hay into G's truck for the delivery. Either way, though, I needed to unload the 60 bales of hay, to load it into the second truck if necessary, and to be able to raise the dump body to get at the leak underneath it and to check the hydraulic reservoir. There wasn't enough space on the loading platform behind the truck, so I offloaded it over the side and then stacked it in front of the truck (the "third move"). I then raised the dump body so that we would have access underneath (the hydraulic pump is electric and doesn't require the ignition to be turned on -- this is important to know when we got to investigating the leak under the dump body).

G brought down a large can of transmission fluid to put into the truck, and put two quarts into the transmission. Then we started the engine to warm up the transmission, and we did a quick check of the leak under the dump body. And then, we shut off the engine as quickly as we could.

The leak under the dump body was from a capped fuel line, from one the truck had two fuel tanks, because the line had cracked.

The fuel that this truck uses is gasoline, and it had been spraying in a fine mist over loose hay on the loading platform. The loading platform that this truck, with a hot muffler, drove back and forth across on a regular basis.

This had had the potential to be very bad. We were lucky that we found it when we did.

Even with the engine not running, the ignition would start the fuel pump, and fuel would again spray out of the crack in the hose.

G replaced the short section of hose and we re-tested to confirm that he had stopped the leak. Then, I drove the truck back and forth a couple of times to distribute the transmission fluid, and it moved quite well for that.

G had to leave, so my father and I then reloaded the truck with the 60 bales, both of us carrying them from the front to the back of the truck, and me alternately putting about five of them into the truck and then climbing up and stacking them. This is the "fourth move".

Then, a rope to secure the load, and we were ready to go. Just as we were finishing this, G returned, having received instructions from my brother R to follow us in his truck to make sure that we made the delivery OK, and then take our truck up to their garage to double-check all of the hose fittings and hoses.

We drove the load to the farm that had ordered the hay, dumping it through a large door into the center aisle of their horse barn, and then helping stack it to one side in that barn. This is the "fifth move". Then we drove the truck back to our farm, with G still following, and he then took it up to the garage, where it is right now.

60 bales of hay, moved five times, or the equivalent of moving 300 bales. To give perspective on this, when I unloaded it in front of the truck, I put it on the floor scale that we use to weigh large loads for anyone who wants hay by weight rather than by bale count. The load weighed about 1,900 lbs.

To put another perspective on this, we brought in six wagon loads of hay in one day this past summer, on the order of about 1,100 bales of hay. There were 6-8 of us moving the hay on that day, though.

My arms are a bit tired right now. So are my father's legs.