The Combine Stuck at the Elevator Gate
A brand-new combine that was one inch too wide for the elevator gate turned an ordinary Tuesday into a three-county discussion.
There are some purchases a man makes that he regrets slowly, and some he regrets in front of an audience. I bought my new combine in the spring, a big green machine with an air-conditioned cab and a monitor that told me the weather. It had every feature a farmer could ask for. I had read the brochure for weeks. What I had not read, apparently, was the part of the brochure that listed its width.
I drove it into town in June, to the grain elevator, as proud as a man in a parade. The elevator has a gate at the entrance, a steel affair that has stood there since the 1950s, built for machines of another age. I lined up the combine carefully and eased forward. There was a long, drawn-out sound of metal considering its options. And then we stopped, the combine and I, wedged tight in the gate, with exactly one inch of the header pressed against each post.
A crowd gathered. The first man to arrive was the elevator manager, who walked slowly around the machine and said it looked nice. The second was a farmer in a pickup, who got out and said that he had seen this before, in 1994, with a different machine, in a different gate. The third was a boy on a bicycle, who asked if it was a new kind of art. By ten o'clock, there were twenty people, three dogs, and a woman selling lemonade from a card table.
We tried everything. We let air out of the tires, and the combine sank a half inch and wedged tighter. We tried greasing the posts with lard from the diner, which got us a smell and very little else. In the end, a young welder from the shop next door put on his mask, cut the gate hinges with a torch, and swung the whole gate open like a door. The combine rolled through, and the crowd gave a respectful cheer. The manager said he had been meaning to replace that gate for thirty years. A tractor and equipment guide would have told me to measure first, and I measure now. I paid for the hinge, and the manager put a plaque on the new gate with my name. It was written up on farm.FM as a case study in procurement.
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