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07/28/2009: "The Wheat Harvest"

Finally, time for harvesting the wheat! Lou and I knocked the few remaining panels off the carton enclosing the thresher, and got it mounted on the tractor. Lubed it up with the grease gun; only broke one Zerk fitting, so that was par for the course. I needed to make a trip to Wilco anyway to get a short shaft PTO anyway.

Once back from the store we tried it out with some bags of wheat tillers that Lou's family had cut. The photo above shows the bits of chaff flying out of the discharge chute of the awner, which is covered with the green plastic cloth. Lou is feeding tillers into the entrance to the awner on the other side of the thresher. It worked!

The thresher has two stages: the main stage is the awner, which separates the kernels from the stalks. The stalks are supposed to be fed into the awner entrance using a feeding table, but unfortunately the feeding table could not be mounted because it ran into interference from the tractor tire; I'll have to cut the table down to get it to fit. The awner is not really very different from a large chipper shredder: there is a rotating vaned drum inside that breaks up the tillers and separates the grain from the stalks. The air flow generated by the vanes pushes the lighter material, including stalks, out the discharge chute, while the heavier kernels fall into the green tray below. We spent quite a while fiddling with the clearance in the awner; this clearance, along with the thresher RPM, controls the propensity of the grain to fall down and the chaff to be thrown out. The awner inlet opening is kind of scary: it's about six by twenty-four inches wide, with the vanes just six inches down; one has to continually remind oneself of how dangerous it is, and keep hands and fingers away. Surprisingly, there are no large decals warning of the danger - despite being made in Italy, it perhaps is not CE-approved.

The second stage is visible at the end of the thresher that is furthest from the tractor; you can see the small hopper on top where grain from the first state is fed in for cleaning. This second stage cleans the grain by blowing air across the mixture to blow the lighter, smaller bits of chaff out a second discharge chute, while the cleaner grain falls down to a second discharge chute. There is an adjustment at the hoper that limits how much grain is allowed to flow through the cleaner; you want a small but steady stream.

We took the tractor and thresher down to the field, and tried it out on the wheat that had bindweed twined into it; we figured that would be the worst case. It seemed to process it OK, and yield kernels in the bucket, but we found that the bindweed held the stalks together so much that it tended to clog on the awner discharge chute. When the mosquitos turned ravenous we went back to the house for a beer (hefeweizen, of course) and called it a night.

The next morning I was up at six, and I immediately got to work weeding the farm garden while it was cool. Lou suggested that the rabbits seem to be eating the bean plants; that would explain why they keep getting knocked over, and then mysteriously disappearing. He helped me by setting up an electric fence perimeter on the garden.

Around 9am my friends Pam and Randy showed up, and we got organized. We figured out that there were four jobs for our four people: one person to cut the wheat with the sickle bar mower; one person to carry a sheaf to the thresher; one person to feed the sheaves into the thresher; and one person to manage the straw and clear any clogs in the discharge chute. We decided to concentrate on the cleaner wheat that was free of bindweed to see how much we got done. In pretty short order we were all ticking along like a real team!



You can see that the "straw man" (Randy in this photo) has the shady job!



It was hot, as you can see from the photos. We learned to be very precise and economical in our movements: pick up the sheaf of wheat on the ground from the tiller end so that the you can pull out the sheaf without disturbing the wheat that you're leaving on the ground. Lay the sheaf on the cart in the same way each time so that the feeder person can develop a consistent movement to get the tillers into the thresher. One especially useful trick that I came up with was to not allow the thresher to take in the whole straw; instead; put the tiller end of the wheat into the thresher while retaining a grip on the straw. Swish it around while the vanes beat the tillers to release the wheat, and the pull out the straw from the inlet and toss it off to the side. This really sped things up because you don't have to wait for the thresher to eat the whole stalk.



Around noon we moved the tractor and thresher to a new part of the field. "What's that noise?" said Lou. "I don't konw," I said. We lowered the thresher back onto the ground, and the noise diminished. Shrugging our shoulders, we revved up the engine again and prepared to start feeding in wheat sheaves. Suddenly, there was a loud clanking, and the PTO shaft broke!



We said goodbye and thank you's to Pam and Randy, and I went back to Wilco. They gave me my money back, because we were not exceeding the power rating or the angle of operation (the thresher is set so that the PTO operates at exactly 25 degrees, the limit for PTO continuous operation). However, Wilco did not have a replacement, which is just as well; I wasn't thrilled with the durability of that PTO shaft (it was much thinner than the mower or the rototiller shafts that I have). When I got back Lou and I managed to put the rototiller PTO shaft in place, and we did another 45 minutes of threshing before the heat became too, too much.

Here's Lou's report from the farm after I left:

Well it was an exceptional day. did some processing with the wife and daughter before it got too hot. After that i started to cut the wheat down. At the hottest part of the day i had my wife go to goodwill and get me a white long sleeve shirt with a kaki short pants, while i took the kids to a seaweed pond to swim (truax island was gated and locked). Had a good time getting seaweedy with the children and teaching them that the water in ponds is still fun to play in even if you have to wade through seaweed to get to open water. Then came home, changed into my white clothes and finished cutting the wheat. You know when you don't stop to get the little kernels of wheat out of your shoes they soon start to feel like boulders that some cruel person slipped into them while you wernt paying attention. When you cut the wheat it naturally falls toward you and when you brush it with your leg you're going against the grain so to speak, so it scratches a little. Times that by thousands and you get sandpaper. My legs feel a little scratchy now to say the least but its only slightly annoying not painfull really. Had dinner and did some more processing with the wife and kids. The green barrel is full of rough processing, the galvanized can is 3/4 full of fairly clean wheat; although the final thresher is not perfect its still pretty clean, a pretty sight if you ask me. There are some very large patches of prime clean wheat that I cut through that should process faster with a better yield (doing mostly dirty wheat with family as it is much slower than with you). The tractor could be moved soon, but only to get into the shadow of the big oak so the family would be more inclined to start working out there earlier, also the best wheat is over there.

My brother inlaw may come over to help tomorow evening, but regardless i will be threshing with my wife. If its endorphines, im addicted to them; I got them today.