Weather Gives Opportunity

This week has been a welcome relief as we are finally getting some moisture that we desperately needed. Most of the week has been pucker and spit (growing up we always assumed a rain shower was near when people talked about the sky puckering up and spit is just a drop or two, barely enough to get our hopes up before breaking off to sunshine again). But once and a while, we got a good shower to wet things down and to calm the dust.
The dampness thwarted my plans for cutting the logs I have in the landing into 16 inch firewood chunks. The logs have to be dry since I measure and mark each tree into the proper dimensions so the end product, firewood, is all the same size. When the logs are wet, the wax lumber marking pens do not work, and I am incapable of eyeing distance (even if it is just inches) that accurately.
Instead of cutting wood, we worked on the gas pedal of the big red beast. The connection between the foot pedal inside and the throttle arm below had broken on the very last load of hay as the truck was backed into the barn. That is where it stayed until we had time to work on it. Rain gave us that time.
It was an all day adventure. There was a series of lifting the cab and lowering the cab (we needed the bucket tractor to lift the cab off the engine). One person under the truck, the other inside the cab. Both of us underneath with our arms high above trying to insert a cotter key into a pinhole size slot in a bracket, or both of us on our bellies with our heads nearly touching as be flattened along the floorboard in an attempt to re-attach the foot pedal with a curved bolt.
The good news is we got the truck back up and running. The bad news is that it is so late in the season we will not be needing the farm truck again until late next spring.
We needed to move it out of the barn across the river and into the bull barn for the fall and winter, making more room for the firewood cribs. Since the truck takes up a lot of space, Mike used the forks on the front of the tractor to load two full cribs into the truck where the wood will continue to cure while the truck is in the bull barn.
The end result freed up a lot of room where the firewood is curing. The footprint space of the truck itself can hold 5 cribs (2-1/2) cord and opened the space for the 2 cribs (1 cord) that is sitting in the truckbed that is now in the bull pen. Now I’ll wait until the weather clears to work on firewood in earnest since I have 3-1/2 cord of wood needed to fill the space.