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Re-occuring Thoughts and a Pain in the Ass?
Part of the normal harvest routine involves testing the grain for moisture content making sure it is dry enough to harvest, store and keep with it going to waste on you.
For this we have a moisture meter we use where we weight out a sample, check the temperature of the grain and cross-reference it with a meter reading on a moisture chart.
The sample doesn't have to be very big, a re-used coffee tin or ice cream pail holds more than enough grain to get an accurate reading. Usually, as I weight and test the sample, I'll stick the thermometer in the remaining grain in the pail. By the time I'm done getting the reading, I have an accurate temperature on the grain too.
This year. for the damnest of reasons which are beyond my limited comprehension, I kept reminding myself not to forget the thermometer in the sample pail as when I am done with the samples they get dumped back in with the rest of the grain.
Be damned if after all these years, of which I have always remembered to put the damn thing back in it's place, if I didn't forget to remove it from the sample pail before dumping it into a running augar.
Now, if your not sure what an augar is, lets just call it a grain-handling device similar to a drill bit in design but on a much larger scale that has been the cuplrit behind many farmers permantly losing an appendage.
The augar in this case had been set up under a bin that lets the grain run out underneath into a hopper basket where it's carried away, something like a conveyer would carry it, into a truck box.
Realizing what I had done, the chances of the thermometer not being destroyed very slim, there was little to do other than wait for the truck to fill and then check through the remaining grain in the hopper to see if it somehow did not get sucked into the augar and shattered.
You may be thinking, what's the big deal? Just go buy a new thermometer!
Well, I live out in the boonies. Just to go somewhere where I might find a new one is largely, a big pain in the ass. The thermometer itself is nothing special, about the size of a pen and probably quite similiar to one a doctor may use to give you a 'pain in the ass', I really have no clue off the top of my head where I would find one on short notice.
Alas, when the augar finished running and I removed it from the hopper, be damned if I didn't find it in the hopper unharmed! What are the chances?
For this we have a moisture meter we use where we weight out a sample, check the temperature of the grain and cross-reference it with a meter reading on a moisture chart.
The sample doesn't have to be very big, a re-used coffee tin or ice cream pail holds more than enough grain to get an accurate reading. Usually, as I weight and test the sample, I'll stick the thermometer in the remaining grain in the pail. By the time I'm done getting the reading, I have an accurate temperature on the grain too.
This year. for the damnest of reasons which are beyond my limited comprehension, I kept reminding myself not to forget the thermometer in the sample pail as when I am done with the samples they get dumped back in with the rest of the grain.
Be damned if after all these years, of which I have always remembered to put the damn thing back in it's place, if I didn't forget to remove it from the sample pail before dumping it into a running augar.
Now, if your not sure what an augar is, lets just call it a grain-handling device similar to a drill bit in design but on a much larger scale that has been the cuplrit behind many farmers permantly losing an appendage.
The augar in this case had been set up under a bin that lets the grain run out underneath into a hopper basket where it's carried away, something like a conveyer would carry it, into a truck box.
Realizing what I had done, the chances of the thermometer not being destroyed very slim, there was little to do other than wait for the truck to fill and then check through the remaining grain in the hopper to see if it somehow did not get sucked into the augar and shattered.
You may be thinking, what's the big deal? Just go buy a new thermometer!
Well, I live out in the boonies. Just to go somewhere where I might find a new one is largely, a big pain in the ass. The thermometer itself is nothing special, about the size of a pen and probably quite similiar to one a doctor may use to give you a 'pain in the ass', I really have no clue off the top of my head where I would find one on short notice.
Alas, when the augar finished running and I removed it from the hopper, be damned if I didn't find it in the hopper unharmed! What are the chances?
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3 Comments
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Comment by Garnet Nagy on September 27, 2008 at 12:00am - I am sorry to hear that. At least he didn't do what a lot of them old sawyers did though....leaning towards a running saw is never a good plan.
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Comment by Cheryl Baumgartner CITRMS on September 26, 2008 at 10:53pm - Yes be very careful. My cousin lost an arm at a sawmill. Just wasn't paying attention
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Comment by Garnet Nagy on September 26, 2008 at 7:14pm
- Okay, today while I was sampling some grain by taking handfuls just over the augar, and watching my dumb-ass helper at the same time, I almost stuck my hand into the augar instead of the 'grain-stream', DAMN....gonna have to really watch that....far to common for people who have been tending to matters that involve a certain element of danger for too long to forget what they are doing and hurt or kill themselves. Like last year for instance, when a very well experienced bin mover forgot what he was doing and moved a bin right into a power line.....RIP.
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