This OLD man is SORE TODAY!!!!

The middle son is on a five day vacation to AZ. So I am doing his chores. Yesterday the silo unloader quit working. It is an older Van Dale one.

He just opened the silo last week. He used up all the corn silage he had in bags. Usually we switch to the up right silos about now. The cold weather is usually about over and the ground around the bags gets muddy in the spring. As you all know this year the cold is still here.

So I have to climb the silo to check it out. the unloader is in the 38th door on a 40 door silo, just about the top. LOL

Get up there and find the gear box on the unloader busted. I do mean busted. The case had a split in it, oil everywhere. We just completely overhauled it two years ago. The parts where just at a $1000. Shortly after that I was at an auction and there was a Van Dale unloader on the sale bill. I bought the complete unloader for $100.

I took the unloader completely apart and rebuilt the gear case for a spare as we have three Van Dale unloaders that are all the same.

So I get the electric winch out and drag the cable up the silo and hook up a snatch block. Back down the silo to hook the "good" gear case to the winch. The winch does have a remote so you can operate it as you follow the cable up. Get the gear box up the silo. Take the old one off. Find out the auger drive shafts are different. It seems that there was a serial number break that my parts book did not show. So I had to take both gear boxes back down the silo.

Get them into the shop and make one good one out of the two. Take the combined gear box back up the silo. Get it installed and run it while I am up there all seems well. Get all the tools an winch back off/out of the silo. I go back up with a pitch fork and throw the silage that is oil covered out of the silo. I did not want to waste a whole foot across the entire silo. Get everything set back up down at the bottom. Start the unloader running. All is well for about half the feeding. Then the unloader quits throwing silage. Go back up and the blower belt had come off. Burnt it some too. Back down the silo to get a new belt for it. Back up the silo and get the blower unplugged and the new belt on. Finally at about 6 PM had it working correctly.

It took me all day and I don't know how many trips up and down the silo. My other son helped me some but he had his own chores to do too.

I can feel every trip up and down the silo this morning. I feel like I did a few rounds with George Foreman and not on his grill. LAMO

This old man is going to take it easy today.

Hope you fellows have better luck than I had.

Don't know how old you are JD. I'm 61 and know what you mean. BUT is there anything more satisfing than fixing something broke or having a little something different today than just doing the feeding?

Yes, some days you just spin your wheels. At the end of the day,a day of heavy labor, your back at the same place before the gear box broke.Hopefully this is the last ARCTIC blast thru Iowa. Ready for mud and sunshine. gobble

Now aren't you glad it didn't cost another $1000 to fix it.
Walt

JD,
Last week we tapped the Maples in the 60A bush.
Last year I drove the tractor while the others in the family hung the buckets. This year the uncle was better and he drove the tractor and I ended up carrying and installing the covers.
The snow was knee deep, but not yet packed, so snowshoes wern't real efective. We hung 2000 buckets in 4 days, and estimated that we each had probably walked 6-7 miles each day in that stuff. I was abit conserned about how well I would do, as I had multiple strokes back in early 2013. Surprisingly I felt real good when we finished up. Had a little soreness in my calves, but that was all. One of my cousins, one generation younger was really hurting when we finished.
All winter I have been finishing off the inside of my attached 24x40' tractor shop. Lots of ups and downs, hanging sheet rock, mudding it in, and painting it, so I guess that excersize served me well.
Loren

Are there a lot of uprights still in use in the midwest? Only know of one or two still being used in this county.

After your ordeal, I'm getting an inkling of why they fell out of favor. . .

"I feel like I did a few rounds with George Foreman and not on his grill"...............now THAT'S just flat funny!

Hang in there old man and get rested up. All this WILL happen again.

I'd hate to be the vacationing son and have to listen to you "complain" about all this when he gets home. Go easy on him.

Well you know you got your exercise in yesterday going up and down the silo. If it makes you feel any better that sounds exactly like my luck though. Hope you have better luck today with your chores.

I couldn't agree more.

Hey, just think.....

If you do that every other day, you would truly have BUNS of steel.
Sorry to hear you had a rough one, mine wasn't really all that bad, just a whole bunch of chaos, with a few Californians mixed in.... Bryce

P.S. I have NOTHING against people from Cali. But these people are full blow city slickers, and are TOTALLY helpless...

I live in cal. sad to say some times I agree with some of you who live in differnt states than mine. Some times if I look hard enough I find hopeless people in any state in the U.S.A. I live in a town where every body claims the farmer does nothing but seats aound and collect a pay check. The say a grocery store is where to get food. They have no clue where there food comes from.I am still L.O.L.

I don't miss battling silo unloaders! I know what you mean about sore. I put hardwood floors down in my aunt's house last week. All of the up and downs my backside and knees were killing me. Must be using muscles I hadn't used in awhile.

I didn't think too much about your climbing 38 doors to get in the silo. But, then I got to thinking about our 60 foot silos and they have 24 doors(2&1/2 foot each). It gives me a new appreciation for your effort.

J D. I have been thinking of you this week. I know that your wife has been up here at Mayo. I hope her stay here is successful. I had surgery last week here and have had a catheter in me since last Wednesday. It comes out tomorrow morning and none too soon. It feels like they made it out of a length of barbed wire and put a sand burr on the end of it. Talk about something that will test your endurance and bring you to your height of awareness. I wish I could have been there to help you work on that silo unloader.. A couple of hits of oxycodone and they say that you can handle almost anything but plan on time in the detox center.

30 years ago i worked one winter on a 250 cow dairyfarm in Ontario.This place had 6 or seven of these silo's and 2 air tight ones.
I haven't had a day i that i was there that i did not had to climb up in one or two and sometimes 3 of them cause of some trouble with an unloader, what a royal pain in the arze they were
I made a promise to myself to never again work for some outfit that utilize them or own one of these G-damm silo's for the rest of my life.On the next place i hired on I extended that promise to include working for or owning a farm with irrigation equipment from hand to wheel moves to center pivots
I kept the promise. :wink:

40 doors x 2.5' door fronts....100' silo?????????

I feel for ya, we have two silos and I make a pile, one silo is a Madison bottom unloader, when we get real cold weather like this it freezes up, not the unloader but the silage to the wall of the silo and hangs there. And the top unloader freezes to the sides and the Badger doesn't get all of it, then the thaw comes and there is a mess, so for running a dairy I feed out of all three all winter. If I only have the bottom left I don,t get much milk if they don't get fed silage until night chores.

Your tale of woe , is the reason I have only Pit silos. Learned to hate tower silos when I was a kid.

Must be your turn for a vacation??

Yeah..what"s more satisfying is pushing the button and everything working as it should! Nothing infuriates me more than worn out junk....because it ALWAYS fails when you need it the most.....ask me how I know!

"This old man is going to take it easy today. "

How many times have I had that delusional thought! LOL

They sold it as ninety foot silo. The doors are not 2 1/2 foot there shorter. I have not measured them but they are real tight for me to get through anymore.

This silo is the same as the two on my home farm. They all where built in 1970. Same guy sold them all.

When I got out of bed this morning I would just about have given the other $1000 to someone to have fixed it. LOL Not really I am too much of a tight wad.

(quoted from post at 14:16:15 02/25/14) Yeah..what"s more satisfying is pushing the button and everything working as it should![b:2f96d7fb76] [u:2f96d7fb76]Nothing infuriates me more than worn out junk[/u:2f96d7fb76]....because it ALWAYS fails when you need it the most.....ask me how I know![/b:2f96d7fb76]

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HA HA, :roll:
The farm i worked(see previous post) was brand spanking new at that time, first winter in use.
Barns ,Silo's,overhead belt feeding system, all the equipment Brand new,..everything was automated.
What a friggin disaster that place was.
I heard it went broke long ago.

I make every effort to feed out of bags in the winter so as to avoid unloader and frozen silage problems.This winter feeding out of bags is even hard as the stuff has frozen so bad that it is hard to dig out with the skidloader.You end up with chunks that you have to run over to mash up.Two days ago the water line to the two steer waterers froze so we are now hauling water as well.I do not think spring is going to come this year.Why do unloaders always cause problems at the top of the silo and never at the bottom?LOL

Vernon: I will be 64 in Aug. I do enjoy working with the cattle. Feeding and tending livestock has always been enjoyable to me.

JD, if I recall correctly, you were hauling a minimum of about 280 pounds each time you went up the silo. That's what I carry and I do well to get to the third rung of an eight-foot ladder.

I hear you about the tight part....doors on a couple of mine have shrunk.

The guy that was on my farm 3 owners ago put up a poured concrete silo. I'm told he was said to have wanted to have the tallest silo in town. Assuming the form sheets were 4' wide, it's either 80 or 84 feet tall and then the domed roof starts. Looking inside the silo, you can see it's never even been half full. Theres only about 60 acres acres of real hayland on this place. I figure he must have planned on renting a lot of land. We've never done a darn thing with that silo other than use it as a land mark when giving directions. There is no sign an unloader was ever installed in that silo, no tripod at the top, no place to attach the winch, nothin'.

Gotta wonder about people sometimes.

When I was about 14 in 1963 I was a totally trouble free silo unloader for about 65 milkers for about $2.00 per hour. I also wheeled it to the feed bunk. Do you think that inflation would make me too expensive now?

I figure with all the winter stuff on like cloths and boots I weight in right at 300 LBS. I have to climb a few doors and wait a second or two to regroup any more.

I used to just climb them straight up and not stop until I got to where the door was open. Not anymore.

Still sore this morning.

JD ,I can relate to your pain of going up & down all day . I am 12 yrs older than you , but used to help feed cattle for my dad. We had 3 uprites, only 40' , but after the 19th time they seemed very tall silos. Like you said , the unloaders only broke on the coldest day of winter in northwest Ill. Take care of yourself,J D. clint