There are several unique spots that invite a person’s imagination to roam when looking over a 9000 series John Deere combine.

One spot is situated towards the front, directly below the cab, below the feederhouse, closed in on either side by the front wheels and lift assist cylinders for the feederhouse itself.

You have to duck double to get under there at the front of the feederhouse, and once under, the bottom of the feederhouse slopes back up towards the rear of the combine.  By the time you have rolled on your rollaway chair to the back, you can sit comfortably with your head just grazing the feederhouse floor,  elbows nudging the lift assist cylinders on either side, and knees bumping right up against the sharp angle iron brace for the transmission. 

In front of you are the seven shoe auger supply bearings that so commonly wear out and need to be replaced.  If you are lucky, you can slam the roll pin through the keyed gear, loosen the locking collar on the bearing, grab a really big punch and a minimum of a two-pound sledge to drive the shaft back up and through the gear, bearing, and locking collar. 

You’ll be under there for a number of hours.  It’s a nice place to think and get away from all the incessant clamor of country music that your coworker kicks on as his second move in the morning and which same button gets pressed as his second to last move each evening.

Obviously, if you have eaten Taco Bell recently, the place can get extremely constrictive in a very short amount of time as you strain away at your work under there.

It’s always hot under there, unless, of course, you are doing a farm call and are doing your work outside on a winter day towards the tail end of harvest.

And, should the shaft refuse the two pound sledge hammer’s instructions, then the torch becomes necessary, and the acrid smoke from melting grease and plastic seals becomes nigh well intolerable. 

I would torch as long as I could, holding my breath until my vision started to blear off and I wasn’t sure if I was torching shaft or bearing, click off my torch in a sequence that always left the oxygen on just a wee bit longer than the acetylene, resulting in a nice loud crack as it snuffed itself out even as I skittered myself out from under and gulped huge lungful’s of fresh air.

*****

Coming from the farm as I did, with nary a lick of mechanical experience, I was learning on the fly.  There wasn’t a day went by that I didn’t feel extremely threatened by those longtime mechanics on either side of me.  And they sort of held to their side of things by helping me feel threatened also, as sort of a senior dog/underdog play.

You fought to survive, to gain ground, to be accepted.  And, whether I gained ground or was accepted in their eyes, I’m not sure.  But I did survive, made a decent living for my family those seven years in fact.  And it seems I made a few friends along the way. 

However, the journey wasn’t without price.  To be fair, I probably exacted just as high of a price on my colleagues as they did on me.

*****

I had been there a couple of years and felt a little entitled to a snooty face when he walked in on his first day of work.

He was huge.

Probably 6’ 6” in his socks and all of that fairly well shaped up.  They said he was going to start in setup, work on general combine repair and if he proved good, they’d move him on into the main combine shop. 

I liked him, but I was just as scared of him.

He came into our shop one day and said he was supposed to R and R feederhouse wearstrips.  He said he had looked at them and it looked like they just snapped out with a prybar and a few taps with a hammer had the new ones in.  My coworker put on his best poker face and replied, “Yep, just snap ‘em out, snap ‘em in.  You’ll have them done in a jiffy.”

We didn’t tell him there were two hidden locknuts on each strip that required a specialized wrench, removal of the whole feederhouse, and hours of labor.  We watched, instead, through the door window between our two shop for several hours as he fretted this way and that, trying to conform his huge frame either to the top of the feederhouse, or twisted double underneath as he tried, in vain, to change those wearstrips. 

He came back to our shop a while later and told us in a rather beaten tone of voice that he guessed he just didn’t have what it took. 

That’s when we took a flashlight and showed him the hidden locknuts and the specialized wrench.

Evidently we failed to see the marks of revenge twitching around the corners of his nose and the edges of his eyes. 

Because from that day on, we had a more or less friendly war going on in various stages of intensity. 

*****

Months had gone by since that first day, and Buck and I were good friends.  There was always payback needed to be exacted, though, depending on whose turn it was to get who.

Apparently I had lost track of who was who, and was tucked neatly away under my feederhouse, changing the above described bearings when I saw the door to the setup shop open.

From my hunched over position, I saw two number 14 boots and a pair of clean blue denim jeans up to about the knees striding my way.  The floor of the feederhouse blocked my view of everything else off. 

I didn’t pay the boots too much mind because those in setup often traversed through our shop to get to the front of the store and the parts counter.  I figured there was every chance those boots were headed there.

But then my peripheral picked up on a gait change.  The walk changed to stealthy, circumventing like.  The feet were laid down gingerly as if to make as little noise as possible.

It was a winter day, and the shop was a little cool, like normal.  I was wearing my winter coat, which was probably the best to the wear, all things considering, as I realized later. 

“Kinda warm under there?”  His question seemed odd to me; actually, I was a little on the warm side, having been in a fight with those bearings for some time already.  However, I didn’t know how he could have seen it.

I opened my mouth to reply, but no reply made it out as I saw two hands drop into my range of vision below the feederhouse floor.  In one hand was a can of aerosol penetrating oil.  In the other, a cigarette lighter.  Those hands were still four feet or so away but were approaching fast.  Even as they did so, I saw the hand with the cigarette lighter move towards the can of penetrating oil. 

Several sketchy thoughts blitzed through my mind, mostly involving escape ideas, that I didn’t have much room to flinch or I’d hit any part of me lovely body on the sharp objects close at hand, and, lastly, that it must have been his turn at pay back, something that still remains a question to this day.

I had no time to react before the thumb on the hand holding the lighter gave it a flick, and I saw a long yellow flame dancing its way towards me.  Then just as quickly, I saw the thumb on the other hand depress the spray nozzle on the penetrating oil and in one fluid motion both hands intersected with the hand holding the lighter directly in front of the oil spewing nozzle. 

A sheet of flame advanced from a foot outside my little sanctuary to well within.

The temperature rose exorbitantly. 

I recoiled against the far side and I heard, from somewhere near the confluence of the flames, “Kinda warm under there?”  And it seemed to sound like it came from a mouth that was smiling, maybe even laughing. 

By that time, I had ducked past double and shot out of the far side, under the lift assist cylinders, gulped in a massive breath of air since I had been holding mine for some time, and made a fast attack in the general direction of the flames.

But they had gone out already, since the thumb depressing the nozzle no longer depressed it, and all I saw was a huge retreating figure and heard distant sounds of cackling laughter.

The flames and heat were one thing, (nothing was burned actually) but more maddening was the oil that hadn’t burned and now covered everything in its path, including all of me.

It was still early in the afternoon, and I knew I’d wear that oil for the rest of the day. 

I still like Buck and stop in to chat with him whenever I am in his area.