Category Archives: Machinery

Machinery, Weather

Finally the Hay is in

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Like tens of farmers this year I really wasn’t sure we would get the hay in. It was ready at the start of July but it just kept raining 2 days out of 3 and August was no better.

Last Sunday the Met Office and OpenWeatherMap were promising that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday would be dry so I cut the 4 acre field. The grass wasn’t great as it had been standing for weeks but it’ll be good enough for the sheep.

The forecasts were wrong it rained every night and some times during the day. Not too heavy but not ideal, I even tedded in a shower. The forecasters were saying heavy rain on Friday and rain every day thereafter, but Thursday looked OK. If Wednesday was dry we had a chance. Wednesday morning it rained and I thought we had no chance to get it dry enough to bay.

Then the Sun came out mid morning Wednesday and by Wednesday night it wasn’t looking too bad. No rain overnight and although it was overcast on Thursday it was dry enough to bale in the late afternoon. The baler didn’t miss a beat and with the help of 3 friends we manged to get almost all the bales in the barn by 21:30. What a relief.

Machinery

“Doer Upper”

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This is an International B250, it’s  had 3 previous owners the first being a Herefordshire small holder. For the last 5 years it’s been sat in a shed. Mechanically it’s in pretty good shape and fired up pretty straight away. It’s not been restored and hence has almost all the original parts.

The International B250 was built by the International Harvester Company of GB Ltd, at the Bradford works,England. The Bradford works was formerly the Jowett cars and van factory and also built the Bristol crawlers for a period.

The B-250 was introduced at the 1955 Royal Smithfield show and continued in production until 1961.  From the serial number this one came off the production line in 1958.In all just over 30,000 were built unlike the Massey 35 where almost 400,000 were produced.

The B250 has a 30HP 4 cylinder indirect diesel engine, with glow plugs. There’s an indicator on the dashboard to show when the glow plugs are hot. Apparently it’s a notoriously difficult starter.

The brakes are quite unusual as you’ll see from the photos, not only are they disc brakes they’re mounted  on their own drive shafts as opposed to the axle. They didn’t work at all before I stripped them down but they OK now.

Tin work is straight if rather rusty
I am lucky to have a shed
Injection Pump all good
You can almost see the B250 logo through the rust
DIff lock is the spindle in the centre of the drive shaft
Disc back on.

Machinery

Winter’s fuel

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Heating Dumblehole isn’t a matter of turning up the thermostat, the oil central heating just can’t cope even if it’s on 24 hours a day. What seems to work is to have the wood burning Rayburn in the kitchen and the ClearView log burner at the other end of the house fired up. Between the two of them it keeps the temperature pleasant, probably cool by most people’s standards. As a consequence we need a lot of firewood and I do mean a lot, the load in the photo will last just over a year! I don’t have a gym membership but I do have a chainsaw and will cut and split the cord wood by hand.

Usually the wood is dropped off in a neighbours field and I have to move it with the loader. This year with the ground being so dry I though we could get the lorry to drop the wood where I need it. Amanda wasn’t convinced but I was pretty sure we’d get the lorry over the bridge and round the corner, it was close!

I'm pretty sure you'll make it
I’m pretty sure you’ll make it

 

Machinery, Pigs

Berkshires are back

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Once the snow was thawed out we could get the weaners. Steve came over as he hadn’t been before and I think we wanted to try out the new pickup. The snow may have gone but the fields were wet and Steve didn’t get as far as he’d hoped.

First the back end of the horse box when sideways into the gatepost. We managed to pick it up and straighten things out. The the mud was just too much so the 885 came to help again and towed everything down to the pig arc.

The weaners weren’t too bothered and with a bit of encouragement soon came out to investigate.

Machinery

Open and shut Case

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The Massey 35 is fantastic, it’s light so doesn’t cut the fields up, plenty powerful, it even runs the New Holland 276 baler. However sometimes you need to pick things up, e.g. hen houses, pig arks and cord wood to name three. Even with a set of forks on the 3 point linkage it just doesn’t work.

The answer is a loader and ideally a loader with four wheel drive. I was struggling to justify buying a 4wd with a loader just to pick up a few bits of wood and the odd hen house.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I tried a 2wd Leyland(not my favourite tractor anyway) and with only a light pig ark on the loader the back wheels slipped.All the weight was over the front axle absolutely no use at all. It took me best part of 2 hours to get the Leyland back out and the field is full of ruts.

Back in April/May I found a Case IH 885 XL for reasonable money and in pretty good nick. The 885 is probably one of the last tractors to be built before everything went electric & computer crazy so I should be able to mend anything that breaks. The 885 has 4wd, the loader works, more than enough power and came with a grab so I can pick up the cord wood.

Machinery

How many tractors do you need?

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Well, there are certain heavy jobs that need to get done around Dumblehole; moving plywood pig arks, moving cord word for chopping and picking up large bales of straw. Unfortunately the Massey is brilliant but not always large enough to do everything.  So Mike has been looking for a larger tractor and has found an old Leyland which might suit us very well.  There was a little hiccup when Mike went out to move the pig ark as it’s so very wet and muddy it did get stuck.  After about an hours’ digging Mike managed to free it and so it’s now on the drive waiting for some (lots) of dry weather before we try again.

Machinery, Pigs

Toad strikes again

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Thank goodness for a Defender. We needed to take the pigs to Leintwardine and decided to trailer train them in the field. As with all good plans we had to modify them somewhat.
Mike used the tractor because we knew the fields were still quite wet. However, to get to the pig field requires us to go down a muddy slope and up a fairly stiff grassy one. Needless to say the tractor/trailer got stuck and no manoeuvring could free it. So, out came Toad the Defender. We got into our field via our neighbours (thanks Bob) and then pulled the tractor with one of our old sailing ropes. It was touch and go, but with a bit of attitude we managed to pull the whole rig free. The photos show the rope attached when it then got stuck coming back into the small paddock. Again the Defender managed to get it out although because of the angle of the rope we nearly took the gate post off.
So Plan B for trailer training the piggies; we brought them up to the concrete area with the feed bucket and then fed them on the trailer ramp. Fortunately they loved it so we didn’t have to worry about training them everyday. When D-day came they went straight into the trailer with no bother at all.

 

landietotherescue
stucktrailer Tractor and trailer stuck and making a right mess of the paddock.

Machinery

Autumn’s Here

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With the chilly mornings we’ve got the Rayburn up and running. It’s not the most efficient piece of kit but it makes it really cosy in the kitchen. However with the Rayburn and a wood burner  we go through wood at a fair rate of knots.  Back in April I ordered in a ‘little’ firewood for the winter. Rather than buying it already cut and split I thought I’d do it myself as I need the exercise and ‘how hard can it be’.   The photo is 25 tons of tree trunks but I’ve got a great Tanaka chainsaw. Progress has been good if a little erratic, fortunately some friends came to stay. They worked like Trojans spending a full day splitting and barrowing, I think we processed about 5 tons. Thanks Tony, Ali, Victoria and Harry.

There’s probably about 5-6 tons to go but that can wait until next year when I’ve enlisted some other volunteers or should that read victims. Hopefully there’s enough in the wood store for the winter!

Machinery

Haymaking 2015

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Mike Mowing the 4 acre field.Cutting the hay

Well it’s happened; we’ve made our first lot of hay. Mike mowed on Wednesday and then turned it Thursday and Friday and we watched the weather forecast with great trepidation. Rain was forecast on Friday night.  There was nothing we could do except hope it didn’t rain here and thankfully it didn’t.  So Saturday morning Mike rowed up and then checked a couple of hours later and we were on: he said  “I shouldn’t need any help till we’ve got a few bales ready” and then I had an SOS call….the baler simply wasn’t baling. I understand this is typical baler behaviour; it had been wonderful baling the day before at a neighbours, but now didn’t want to play ball. So I spent a couple of hours re rowing bales that were only half tied up. It was incredibly frustrating (not to say tiring) and with proper rain forecast for the night we were under pressure to get the whole lot inside.

Needless to say I didn’t get any photos of Mike actually baling because we were all too busy getting the bales under cover.

We were very lucky in that the above neighbour and her husband came with their trailer and another villager came and helped me with our trailer and we managed to get the lot in the barn by 6pm.  Tea and cake were supplied as incentives.

Lessons learnt:

1. Make sandwiches and a flask of tea so that the person baling and number one helper (me) have some lunch.

2. Make sure you have booked help: we could never ever have managed 400 bales all on our own.

3. Book the whole of June and July off from work in case the weather’s good and the grass is ready. This is of course completely unrealistic as there’s always something that stops you getting out exactly when you want. But we will remember not to go away for 2 days during those months because that did make a difference to the amount of pressure we put on ourselves.

4. I have always thought our farmers have it tough watching the weather and as ex sailors I remember the attention we paid to the forecast. But this was different as there’s a great deal of effort going into haymaking and to think that can be wasted by the weather isn’t good for morale.

5. Hard work but goodness it’s worth it! This is a photo of the hay in the barn:Hay in the barn