Fergus MacGregor: Maintenance mistake sparks new approach
© Fergus MacGregor Heading out on a crisp Saturday morning, I was looking forward to my day drilling winter wheat.
The evening before I had calibrated up and reminded myself how to use the drill, as spring felt like a very long time ago.
I set in, checked the seed depth which, by some miracle, I got right on the first try and trundled down the field.
I was just picking a podcast to listen to when a “beep, beep” came from the control box.
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What calamity was happening now? The fan speed was ok, everything was connected, and the annoying coulter pipe that always falls off was hanging on with a bit of gaffer tape.
I ignored it, and then the alarm screen came up with a warning I hadn’t seen before.
I did the normal thing and turned it off and on. This seemed to fix the issue, until “beep, beep…”.
The manual was mostly in French so was no help, so I gave up and called my dealer as I couldn’t work out what was going on.
It seemed the motor was overloading and getting too hot, causing the alarm to go off, and grime and dust had clogged up the bearing in the metering system, making it hard to turn.
The bearing itself is hard to get to, as it is encased in plastic in a metal container.
I can imagine there are some heads shaking at my apparent lack of maintenance skills at this point but, in my defence, it does have a sticker on it warning you not to be too rigorous when cleaning.
The metering system was taken away by the dealer as we couldn’t strip it on the farm to get to the bearing.
I was left with a two-day wait, watching as the rain once again closed in.
I couldn’t help feeling a bit of an idiot. If only I had done just a little bit more maintenance, this might not have happened.
But as a wise man once told me: “You’ve made the mistake, now learn from it.”