The Useful Duck!

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Thursday, October 29, 2009

More rain, less planting

Today was pretty much a waste. I put together a bill for doing a custom farming job. The guy will owe me $6000 for planting 50 acres of hay. He doesn't have the money. I hope the in-laws who own the place are paying the bill. Ten trips across the field to get it perfect and then I planted half of it in the rain. May have to do some replanting for free this coming spring.
So, if he gets three ton to the acre, and he can sell the hay for $100 a ton, then that will be $15,000 in return. But, most likely it will be two tons of weedy hay cause he didn't get it sprayed and I planted through a pretty good sprout of wild carrot and thistles so I'm thinking a net loss per acre. I better collect now...
Last night my electric flow control for the hydraulic powered pump for the fertilizer on my drill stuck wide open. I had to plant at 7 mph to get the rate right. I did get done sooner so all was not lost. The field looked rototilled. I guess that is a good thing.
I spent all afternoon trouble shooting the flow control. It is a clever motorized flow control with some sort of balanced pressure feedback. You just turn a dial and it runs a motorized valve. Always maintains the same pressure through electronic feedback. Don't have a clue how it works. There are four wires coming out of the motor. Three black wires and one yellow wire. I took it all apart and found nothing I could see that was wrong. I did have an extra motor. I bought a box of Source Hydraulics motors on ebay a while back. I thought I had really wasted my money as I would never use them as I didn't have the valves to go with the motors. One of the motors had a two wire hookup and fit my valve body. Two wires means you can use a double throw reversing switch. So, I wired it all up and it works. I have no guage or reference point but I probably don't need it. Will see how it works tomorrow. Hope to have a break in the showers so I can move to the next field. Need to get back to work.

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