Drive - A Memoir 81st Installment
was
the battery that was thrown off, but a Ford will run without a
battery. Then, there was an assortment of parts: metal pieces and one
of the braces that held the radiator. Then, there was the gas tank –
whoa, we
had bounced off the gas tank!
That was what had killed the engine, starving it for fuel. We pushed
the Whiz Gizzy into the borrow pit, gathered up, threw the broken and
loose parts in the borrow pit. We would come back for the Whiz Gizzy
later.
“You
know why our adventure went so wrong?” I asked.
“Yah,
the traction masters are too short,” Russ reasoned.
“And
the half springs we made,” I added. “The traction bars pushed the
frame up allowing the axel, with only the half–springs, to move
under the Whiz Gizzy throwing it up; then the springs pulled the axel
back only to have it travel under again. Bounce, bounce, bounce,
bounce.”
“Well,
we can fix it, can’t we?” Russ’s asked.
“Sure,
given enough time we can fix it. Furthermore, given enough time we
can do anything!” I said, as we walked home to do the chores. “I
truly believe I can figure out anything.”
Chapter
20
After
morning chores, moving six hand lines of irrigation sprinklers and
milking the neighbor’s fifty cows, we went to work on Carl’s
farms. Carl had sixteen hundred acres of hay that he baled into
ninety pound bales that had to be stacked for winter feed for cattle.
Carl always worked on new methods and copied any idea that might
bring in the hay faster, including trucks, trailers, and lots of
hired men trying to buck and stack hay fast enough to beat the rain.
There was a time he had as many as ten men working the trucks and
wagons in the fields, until we explained our operation with slips and
the bomb carrier the Old Man had built. Carl, then, purchased a
Farmall tractor with a front loader and hay bale grapple fork. He
could pick up twelve of the heavy fourteen by eighteen hay bales, and
stack them, without touching a bale! He would pick up the bales Russ
and I had stacked on the slip and rush over to the hay yard and set
the bales into place. It was slick; by the look of satisfaction on
his face, he treasured it. Carl had four slips built eight feet wide
and sixteen feet long attached to four of his fastest tractors. The
tractors would race to the field, and Russell and I would fill them
with bales two wide, two high and eight long. We’d step off the
loaded slip, and the tractor and driver would tear off to the stack,
tractor blowing black smoke. The next tractor would be lined up
behind; we’d step on the slip and begin to load this one. Carl
would be busy at the stack, unloading with four bites of the grapple
500 more words tomorrow
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