Well the correct final parts arrived for my Italian Abbriata baler. I needed a special welded sprocket to drive the pickup forks. I can mechanic, but I do not particularly like it. However, no one around here will work on something that they did not sell, let alone a piece of equipment that has one American dealership and is made in Italy. So I get to be the mechanic. I ended up replacing five gear sprockets, two chains, various bolts, nuts and pins. I have more spare parts but I have learned that the chain can only be tightened once before it is just time to replace it. I purchased a chain from them and it was twice as long as I needed so I already have the replacement chain. I got the baler put back together and greased, it is ready to roll, I think.
Next I put the sickle bar mower on the Kubota. Now this is the mower that I dropped on my foot last year and broke it. I was pretty gun shy around it and this caused me a few problems. I had to repair two items on the mower and one of them the fastest way to correct was to weld it. My weld did not look bad but it broke about an hour into the mower use. I did not have enough juice to penetrate as deep as I needed. I will need to do something else. For now I just tightened the bolt down as far as it will go and am careful. I greased all of the points on the sickle bar then oiled the blades. It worked! There was a lot of discussion on whether I should start cutting now or wait. I am leaving town next week for a week to go visit navy buddies I have not seen in decades.
I ended up cutting the orchard, upper part of field 2 and went and cut Mike’s field. He stopped by and said it was cleared of all hoses and obstacles so I did it also. I am not going to cut anything else yet as it is supposed to rain on Thursday. I am going to turn it tomorrow and hope to be baling by Tuesday. I don’t have a conditioner so it takes longer for the grass to dry out.
We still have a horrible cheat grass problem in field 3. It is bad. We are going to work on killing the cheat grass down by Mother-in-law’s house. This other field will get added to the kill list.
Stewart Creek Somethings 