Spent the day at the farm today helping my dad and uncle try to figure out how to get the radiator out of our combine. This combine's needed so much maintenance over the past year. I mean, it's been a good machine, but it's been used enough that it's at the point where a lot of parts are getting worn out. Between it and the corn head (the attachment that goes on the front of the combine, which cuts the corn and feeds it into the machine) we've had a bunch of issues this fall. The latest, and biggest, incident was the other day, when dad was coming home from harvesting a neighbor's crops, pulled into the barnyard, and all of a sudden there was a big cloud of steam coming out of the engine compartment. Yay. So, the three of us spent much of the day in the barn, in the cold (because the combine's too big for us to work on it in our heated shop), taking stuff apart and trying to figure out how the hell to get the radiator out of there. It's like the engineers at the factory designed this thing and then were like, "Wait, the radiator has to be removable? We never thought of that. Oh well, it'll be fine." We got cold, dirty, tired, and frustrated. We still don't have it out; hopefully that'll be tomorrow's job. And there are a few more repair jobs (none of them simple or easy AFAIK) yet to do on the combine, once we're done with this one. We'll probably be working on it on and off all winter.
Oh, and our neighbor came around twice to see what we were doing, which would've been fine, except that he had a cold. Thanks for exposing us to it twice in one day, pal. Especially around Christmas. People act like colds are nothing, and maybe for them they are (I hope so), but for me they mean 24-48 hours of misery and a lot of vomiting into a waste basket. I'd rather avoid that if I can.