I update the Gator Sprayer into the Gator Sprayer Maximum Overdrive Firetruck Potential Gator Delux (GSMOFPGD)

There are ideas, there are good ideas and there are successful good ideas. A lot of the difference is in the execution of the aforementioned idea...

My Gator Sprayer project is a grand example. 

It was a project I thought about while driving in circles and concentrated on while sitting in the Emergency room for two days. The codeine combo may have adversely affected the design. (or is it effected-I never know)

The Gator Sprayer has proved to be incredibly handy. The spacing is correct for corn rows. It works for applying hay preservative as you can turn on boom sections to do two windrows at once, it is great for spraying pipelines and ditches.

When I was employed by the Sodomite Learing University I set up a sprayer for a Mule. Due to their lack of understanding on why employee's steal stuff, they would not let me order the sprayer from my brother's business, instead they got royally screwed by a local ag dealer who I am not related to.

Probably because the University sits on stolen land... 

(I have nothing against the salesman. He was super helpful.)

When the sprayer arrived I then had to significantly modify the sprayer to get it to fit in the Mule and to be easy to run by whatever idiot would follow me. It does fit in the Mule and I built a somewhat rickety stand that allows one person to install and remove the sprayer. However, there is no one who can run now it as apparently speed, pressure, and color coded nozzle charts printed by T-Jet are beyond comprehension. (Click here for the link) Also, they "lost" the GPS speedometer. 

But I digress...

I wanted to build a new sprayer from scratch. I had the Gator, I had a box of oddball MicroTrak rate controller parts, I found this trash pump on sale at Harbor Freight, and I found a sprayer tank cheap on Ebay. So I put it all together.

This was the first incarnation with three boom sections and simple plumbing. It has gotten quite complicated since then.

 

It sort of works. The main problem is that I used a small trash pump. I would swear the specs said max output was 65lbs but I could never get more than 45lbs. High volume and now pressure does not work with an automatic rate controller.  It appears that to go to 90lbs I needed a $2,000 pump. The point of the exercise was to see if I could build a skid mounted UTV sprayer that was inexpensive and sell a few. This turned out to be pointless as every farmer I know wants to build their own or buy something from the local snooty GPS seller/dealer.

I used it last year and it sort of worked. The rate controller was too slow to respond which was frustrating. After a season of frustration I decided to upgrade the pump for more pressure. 

I asked CoPilot artificial intelligence and was directed to a Honda Powered 92 PSI pump at Northern Hydraulics for under $1000.  Unfortunately I did not think of the difficulties in plumbing in a new pump with 2" input and output vs 1.25" in and out. This required all new plumbing so I gutted it and started from scratch with a bypass system because I have so much excess flow with a trash pump.

 

It is a mess of plumbing at this point

It has turned into a plumbing adventure. With the new high flow high pressure system I went from a restricted flow set up to a bypass flow control setup. I was advised putting the filter on the output was a bad idea and it needed to go onto suction. My tank outlet is only 1" so I have a restriction there so I went from the tank to the 1 1/2" filter inlet as close to the tank as possible. 

I plumbed the autorate controller valve bypass outlet into the suction line between filter and pump. It should be running a lot of bypass. I plumbed a range control/agitation line right off the pump, then the boom, then the rate controller bypass. I decided to run the sprayer wand off the boom circuit so I could still get a gallon readout. 

I finally just drew it all out on a piece of cardboard big enough I can read without glasses.

This is my regulating valve. I might be too slow for my set up as I am going from 1 to 10 mph with a Gator. 

I got annoyed and gave up at 8:30 pm last night.

Perhaps I should get on it this morning...

But, I have hay fields to look at and fertilize, a leak on the lower the three point link on the White 2-155 that requires a serious pressure clean and transmission drain, feed to make, oats to pick up, and I need a nap already at 8 a.m.

We shall see what the day brings... 

Update: Last night I got into an argument with AI CoPilot about the sprayer plumbing. I think it will create a feedback loop. Now CoPilot says I should plumb the bypass direct to the tank.  I looked up the MicroTrak schematic also which is different. Here is the deal... I used CoPilot because I could give it the hose sizes and it could figure flow. I have a restriction at the tank on suction so I routed the auto bypass back to the pump and the manual bypass to the agitation. I suspect that the whole high volume and medium pressure cheap pump plan will be a failure. Should have bought a roller pump and mechanically adapted it to a cheap Harbor Freight GX Clone...

 

 

 

Fall planting season photos

Mayor Bloomberg and I blame global warming. Floods and droughts and famine and pestilence. All due to global warming. The abomination of the infernal combustion engine and the fires of Mordor.
I kind of figured that after 100 plus days of no rain, it would rain. It just won't stop.
I am on a 150 acre no-tilling job. It is on a former Christmas Tree farm. Meaning hills that are really too steep for most of the local farmers. But I always find the clever ones who have a plan that no one else has yet to figure out.
And so I am no-tilling hard red wheat into a heavy red clay soil on steep rolling hills. No-tilling into bent grass, moss, and wild carrot sod.
Here is a photo...

I must say I am fairly impressed with the Great Plains 1500 no-till grain drill. I seem to be able to plant into just about anything. The sheer volume of mud has gotten to be a bit of a problem. It does tend to plug up the press wheels every hour or so.

This is a photo of the presswheels when thy are still turning. They are not even plugged up yet.

Above is a view out my windshield on Friday afternoon. The sun came out and the field was almost dry enough to actually plant without plugging up. Then there was a cloudburst. The hood is actually white from the sleet.
Below is a screen view of my GPS. I use FarmerGPS which is a program which runs on a tablet PC. Gives me a low cost alternative to the $2,000 Raven system everyone else uses. Plus, the customer service is pretty excellent.
When I dropped my Tablet at the beginning of the week when I slipped on the step and fell out of the tractor cab, I emailed FarmerGPS for a new unlock code for my backup computer. I not only got the code but when I discovered my backup computer wouldn't run the newest version because the graphics card couldn't handle 3-D, they emailed me a previous version of the program that would work. It arrived overnight in my email. It was very helpful.
Below is a screen view of what I have been doing this week. The different colors are the different days I worked. It has been pretty slow going.

But, tomorrow is the start of a new week and I am sure all will be grand...

I acutally worked

I actually planted some 45 acres yesterday. It was a pretty good day considering I didn't get a very early start.
When I arrived at the field the farmer had left for more oat seed but he had in fact filled my drill for me. It was still a little wet and soon got a lot wetter. It poured on me. It was a long drive home so I took my fishing pole down to his creek and lost my Mepps # 5 spinner. I am a terribly bad fisherman.
I retreated back to my drill and started greasing and oil chains and otherwise fooling around.
Then the farmer's daughter brought me cookies and I of course pretended to think she was 22 instead of 26. I have often resorted to flattery to continue my supply of cookies. They were good cookies. They were chocolate cookies. They went good with coffee.
Then I got the genius idea to go look at the field.
The field was less than a mile down the road. It didn't rain there.
So away I went.
I finished in the pouring rain at 9:30 at night.
I love my FarmerGPS program.
You get free upgrades after buying the program.
The latest version gives you a 3-D view like you are driving a video game and it lets you measure fields by clicking and dragging the pointer pen on the screen. (If only it had auto-steer.)
It was raining so hard and there was so much mud and it was dark and I finished the field driving by instruments. I hope on the last pass I did not offset the drill 12 feet and leave a 2 foot unplanted strip a half mile long due to GPS drift.
Without the GPS I would have been completely blind. Of course my foam marker was not working properly. They never work properly for more than a half hour.

Switch hitting

I've spend a week wiring a stupid switch for my grain drill monitor. I am some what of an anateur at electrical wiring. Now when I say amature I mean "pathetic failure," but we should not quibble with semantics.
Those of you who are interested in things like flowmeters, microtrak spraymate monitors, Great Plains 1500 drills, no-till, and FarmerGPS may actually read this post and enjoy it. Perhaps someone will click the offensive comment box. I don't know.
Anyway, I wired a magnetic switch so that when you raise the drill it puts the flowmeter, and calc-an-acre, and the GPS on hold so they stop counting. At one point it also turned the fertilizer valve off. I also have a landmark foam marker that has faulty wiring.
So, I'm trying to wire this all into one switch box. I used a plastic conduit box and made use of several bosch relays and a hay baler stroke counter sensor to do all of this. However, the wires and relays now won't fit in the box and I have to redo it a bunch more.
Yesterday I was soldering the grounds together in the foam marker box and it just started pouring. I decided it would be better not to get electricuted so I gave up on that. Then a fellow came by to discuss no-till and Great Plains drills. Then a fellow showed up who wants me to plant. Then I took my daughter to her Mom's school so they could go into town and watch "the biggest loser," at niece's house. Then I get back and I get started soldering again and it gets dark. I turn on the tractor lights, then it pours. I go in the house and get warm. I come back out and start the tractor and crank up the heater and work on the wire in the cab.
How can it possibly take so long to crimp and route wires and figure out double-pole-double-throw switches? I actually need to get this done and do things I really need to get done. I can't quit now I've got everything apart.
But....It is wet. I'm a little worried about my last 200 acres. I really, really, need the money...
Wonder how many people will click here by mistake with "amature" in the body text. I've thought about spiking a post with all sorts of keywords to see what will happen. Now if I'd combine "amature, naughty, spanking, wanker, and Studebaker" as keywords, I wonder if I would get british studebaker collectors who do all the restoration work them selves, sometimes shoplift, and have an embarrassing personal habit that cold lead to blindness. Now there would be an interesting demographic.
Once I did a search for amature radio. Oh my goodness! And that was with the safe search filter on!!!!

Latest No-till effort

Planted oats into wheat stubble Saturday. I was never so happy to hear the low population alarm go off in my life. Actually that is not usually a really happy experience as it mostly means something is wrong. Finished up at 9:35 in a light rain. Was very happy for my FarmerGPS program. Lets me run guidance on a $60 ebay special, Fujitsu 3400 tablet computer. Oh and how I do hate Windows... but that is another story, one full of violence and broken screen digitizers...and need for self help books on tape!
Anyway here are some photos and them I'm going to bed. It poured down rain today. Think we got like an inch or so in last two days. It is unbelievable how much I have to do and how little I am getting done. Can't sleep at night and can't get out of bed in the morning.
Farming is getting more interesting. Fundumental shifts locally. Grass seed is not moving and farmers are quickly moving to commodity crops, wheat, oats, perhaps barley. Price is terrible. We are going to grow some. Have some very wet ground and I plant on planting the barley when soil temp gets close to 50 degrees. Not sure if I will no-till or not. Hope to get some radish contracts. This would work good in a no-till rotation. Goal is, grass (for hay or seed), wheat or oats, or barley, then radish, then back to grass, or might be able to plant clover with the radish. This is what I would do if we didn't have all wet riverbottom ground.
So back to the no-till. Planted oats into wheat stubble. Did two fields 10 miles apart. First was prennial ryegrass, lots of sprout and very green still, just sprayed out. Planted spring wheat, don't know variety. Next was Montezuma oats into wheat stubble. Fairly tall, some a foot hight. Very wet heavy clay ground. Kind of iffy. Was in a hurry to beat the rain so planted at 7 mph. Looks like it was disked. Hope the heavy rain does not uncover the seed. Applied 10 gallons of 10-34 fertilizer per acre. Goal was 1 inch depth for oats. 120lbs per acre or 1.1-1.4 million seeds per acre. (according to monitor don't know how this applies to actual seed per bushel/lb count)
Have had wide variation in population count with oats. So if you have really heavy oats and you go by lbs per acre you actually have a lower population than if you have little light oats. What does this mean? Obviously you have a lower plant population from what one would think of as better seed. I don't know, I have a liberal arts degree...
Ok, photos are all mixed up. First pictures with the green field are of wheat into recently sprayed prennial ryegrass. Planted 3/4 to 1" deep. Pretty good sod, didn't work the ground very much. More of a silty clay soil. Should have paid more attention. Rate was 120lbs seed, 10 gallons fert. Fertilzer was mix of 10-34 plus some 32. Not sure exact mix used. Was in a hurry must take better notes. Planted at 6.5 mph. Does a pretty good job at that speed.
Photo in the cab is planting oats into wheat stubble 10 miles down the road. Did 75 acres Saturday. Not too bad a production rate for having to drive a long ways to fill the drill, with 50lb bags. Usually 28 bags to the fill. I didn't push it much past the point when the low bin alarm goes off. Have a couple more acres after that but running out sometimes leaves a pattern.
Planting at 8 mph pretty much worked the ground. I really, really hope it comes up good. Could be a lot of problems with this field, too wet, too cold, too many slugs, mice, probably low pH. Time will tell. Good night.

Planting

Here we go. It is the first Sunny Day in January and the neighbor is ready to plant Oats! My neighbor likes to plant his oats early. That is where I come in as I have the no-till drill that he likes. He called me Saturday and said he wanted to start Monday. I was thinking about the new tires I bought for the drill and not thinking about cleaning out the tractor cab or changing the oil or if I had the right orifice plates for the fertilizer rate he wanted to put on.
When I decided to put liquid fertilizer on my drill I of course had to do something different than anyone else. This was under the pretext of saving money but really I just thought the blue screw together fittings looked really cool. Plus, they were free!















The way this all happened was that my cousin had bought a used International drill with a Blumhardt fertilizer setup. Blumhardt booms are made of individual little sections which screw together. Pretty cool idea really. My uncle was once a dealer and he gave me most of his new old stock. Cousin with the International drill is not the son of the Uncle with the Blumhart fittings. Cousin is kind of a far off cousin, like third or fourth or something...
Anyway free sprayer fittings, well, not so much free as my cousin said I could borrow them and he didn't want to sell them to me. So he said I could use them and he might some day decide to put fertilizer on his drill again. This is not real likely as the pump and all the hoses are pretty much shot.. But, It could happen!
Anyway, here is a nice picture of the colorful Blumharts fittings. Woop! Whoop! As Mayor Budd Clark used to say.


Most of the booms set up around here were not set up for 10gallons per acre at 6 mph so finding the right orifice plates was a bit of a chore. The spray bar on my drill was of course used and had sat outside for years. The plastic was a bit stiff and the temperature today was a bit nippy. Finally I just dumped everything in a bucket of hot water. Then my Uncle pointed out a NOS Blumhart kit. So I just exchanged the red orifice plates for purple and screwed them in, only to discover I was short by three. Then my neighbor brought me a nearly new (well 20 year old but it's been in the shed for a while) 24 row spray bar with the deluxe 10lb anti-drip set up. Wow! Now I'm really stylin!
Then the fellow I'm planting for called and said he had decided NOT to apply liquid fertilizer. He filled up his tank at the Co-op and then thought he would as the price. $6 per gallon for 10-34 so @ 10gal per acre it would be $60 bucks an acre for only 10lbs of N. So he pumped it back out again. Of course I decided to work on the liquid fertilizer first...

After servicing the drill I headed to the field, sometime after noon. Three triangular shaped fields. First thing that went wrong is my population monitor quit. I spent an hour on the phone with Loupe ( www.loupelectronics.com ) only to discover there was a connector inside the frame of the drill which had pulled apart. In the process of discovering this I lost all my special settings in the drill monitor. Of course the Oats I was planting turned out to have a different bushel weight than the last batch of Oats I planted and since I had lost my monitor calibration I manage to plant 10 acres at 135lbs per acre instead of 110lbs and so I ran out of seed at 20 acres with five left to go. I planted till 6:30 p.m. but decided to quit when I realized I was planting through water. Not such a good sign this time of year...








Photo is out my windshield. I'm planting cayuse oats into dead fescue sod. Goal is 110 lbs acre with 1" planting depth. Looks like it is doing a good job.
Next photo is what it looks like out the window when the sun goes down. The point of the photo was to show my low budget GPS at work. FarmerGPS is a program that runs on a PC. The red arrows seen at the bottom of the screen in the dark photo are screaming at me to turn left. The purple lines show where I have been. Somewhere I have a close up.

Saturday ramble

I'm a Mac person. I have been a Mac person since the day I gave up on the old Commodore portable. This could be the first time in my life I have purposely and under no duress sat down with a PC and written something just for the fun of it. Strangely I feel no shame.

And since this blog tends to be a bit stream of consciousness I'll digress... Steve Jobs is toast. Pancreatic cancer does not go away. You have it you are are dead. My Mother died of it.The statistics are pretty grim. The average is two years. Should you have treatment, chemo, or the infamous Whipple surgery, the average is still two years. Once fellow lived 10 years. This ruined the curve. Mom lived three months.

That has nothing to do with me using a Fujitsu 3400 tablet PC.

The 3400 is my tractor GPS system.

I am cheap and a bit misguided.

I just downloaded OpenOffice. (www.openoffice.org). I can now do everything that I could do with Microsoft Office. For free.

I am using that ability to avoid work. I just took the Christmas tree down to the river. Have had a hard time getting rid of Christmas trees since I read the Hans Christian Anderson story about the little Christmas tree. I know that they really have no consciousness, but still... So I am setting in my pickup trying out the word processing feature of OpenOffice. It is a beautiful day. The ground was covered with frost when I woke up this morning.

I do wish Apple would have made a tablet computer. Of course I could not afford it.

I am running my GPS guidance system with this Fujistu 3400, (ebay $60), FarmerGPS (program cost $350, see www.farmergps.com), and a Raven Invicta 210 receiver and antenna (ebay $350).

There have been addition costs. My first 3400 had a hard drive failure. ($60 ebay) Then it melted. I was driving along spreading slugbait with my free Ford ranger, using my gps at 20 mph with a heater as opposed to freezing my bottom off using a four wheeler. I smelled electric smoke, then the screen went blank. I saw smoke coming out of the vent on the 3400. I actually melted the motherboard where the USB connector mates in. I just got another 3400 on ebay, which seems to work much better than the first one I bought.

Farmer GPS is just a program that runs on the tablet PC, or any PC for that matter. It doesn't take a lot of processing power. Has a birds eye view, and there is a light bar at the bottom of the screen that will tell you which direction to turn. Will do last pass, circles, AB lines, and you can get an interface box to shut it off when the implement is raised. You can also export shapefiles and I think you an import Google maps. I don't know how to do that but it sounds pretty cool.

I like it as I have a lot of problems when I'm no-till planting after dark. When I plant back and forth I get lost when turning around at the end of the fields. The drill doesn't make enough of a mark to see as you make a wide turn. The other feature is that you can drive around a field and tell the acres, or if you are nearly done, you can also drive in a circle and see how much you have left.

Plus, I can use the PC for iTunes, which lets me listen to music, or if I get really bored, watch cartoons or South Park episodes which I have previously downloaded.

So I am hiding down here at the river. Listening to the hunters blasting away at ducks and not really worrying about all the crap I have to do.

Yesterday I delivered my weeks effort of ground feed. Got $550 out of the deal. Had to take a check.On the way back I stopped by the neighbors place. His truck driver is interested in 50lb bags. They made fun of my truck. Neighbor is a good friend. He has a 1967 red Ford F700 are well. His is in perfect shape. He just waxed it and it looks new.

Mine is not so nice. I bought it somewhere around 10 years ago at an auction. Paid, $2500 for it with side racks and an automatic endgate. Since then it has hauled quite a few loads of silage and hay. Three years ago my cousins son crashed his little Dodge Dakota into it at 50 mph. He was heading down to the river on our farm with his friends. The friends were going ahead and he was following in the dust. Driving pretty much blind on a one lane gravel road. The truck driver headed for the ditch with the first car. Next car didn't see the truck and hit the bed just behind the cab. Since the truck was turning the pickup slid down the side of the bed till it hit the rear duals. It his so hard it bent the truck axle and knocked the rear end completely out from under the truck. Sixteen foot bed loaded with 7 ton of silage. Totaled the pickup. One kid left by ambulance, one by helicopter.

No lasting injuries, other than pride.

I got $3500 out of the truck. Then fixed it up again. It is not the same... There are some wiring problems, lights quit, two speed motor doesn't work. Now the transmission pops out of two gears. At some point in time my larger than life employee stood on the roof, so now if you stop suddenly after a heavy rain, water runs down throught the window which won't roll up completely. Truck drives nice.

Just another thing that needs to be fixed.

I guess with that reminder I had better go back to work...