[Here's another letter from Grampa about the insane terror & crazed, hopeless heartbreak of farm mechanical repairs -- OUC]
5 March 2011
Dear G– Smackelphartz,
Here’s another one for your God-damn collection!
Naturally, there was — long time later! — another fiasco with sealed bearings, way after all of that hay conditioner old shit that I wrote all up before:
http://oldunclecrow.wordpress.com/2006/07/09/in-the-summer-of-58/
First of all, I see that I did not make clear in that writeup five years ago that overgreasing & popping open the rubber-gusseted sealed bearings would then let grit and dust and dirt to get picked up and be spun or wound back in by the extrudedgrease, into the race and balls, or rollers, to actually chew up the assembly.
What the Hell….
*****
Well, any way, twenty-three years later I was to forget my high school farm shop completely, and go to work and flame with propane a stainless bearing race on a cast ground-metal shaft end. This was “to get the girl to swell up and then cool down and then just let go” so I could “just haul off and knock her BANG off the end.”
“Yep,” that should do it I said confidently to Candy, The Red-Haired Waitress, who was helping me that day. Making “the girl swell up” and then BANG, “whamming her off the end” gave Candy a sort of foxy grin and giggles-attack, especially when I told her to hand me “that God-damn three-pound ball penIS hammer there, honey…hehehe!”
Of course it was a God-damn three-pound FORGE hammer, but it got a good laugh out of her all right!
Then Candy, herself never at all difficult in that way, looked on in puzzled wonderment as I flailed and banged and swore at the stuck proceedings. In the end, I had to lug a small anvil, heave the combine header-augur end up on to it to prop where it stuck through the front shroud, try to hold the anvil tipped with a foot on a loose pile of two-by trim-ends to hold the scant available half-inch….
All of that was to then to try to chisel away the race and rollers and, finally, the sleeve, hammering shortly at an odd oblique angle and “not even be able to fetch as much as even one single God-damn good STROKE!”
The difference in malleabilities, the heating and cooling-rates of the two steels, had in fact “made the WHOLE God-damn dirty little bitch ALL the God-damn HARDER to get OFF!”
Finally, I caved, went around to the other side and freed the journal box opposite, so I could “really pull on the shaft” and “lay her out just where I want her!” and “get in just one clean hard shot at the dirty little handpainted bitch-girl!” Naturally, it only made sense then to run BACK in to John Deere, get the second bearing and “let, by God, her have it TWICE!”
“If one part has already gone to Hell, better change ‘em ALL, the dirty bastards!” Thats the rule on that one….
(Only this time I did not heat the second assembly so that “she just plain FLEW off of the end there a WHOLE Hell of lot more quick!”)
” — ….” said Candy murmurously when it was all over. “THAT…ALL…took…a long…a Long, LONG time….”
So then we went in to the house to wash up, and things.
What the Hell….
Old Grampa Outhousespidersson
*****
[Old Uncle Crow
[copyrighted by tio cuervo
[March 5th, 2011]
