Riddle of the Bent Bar.

     Part of the skill set of being a farmer is ingenuity. They can't afford to be wasteful, so when something is broken, it must be fixed.

     This bar is clearly bent. The problem is, it's not supposed to be. As you can see there are a couple of places where the paint has been removed. That's from yesterday's attempt to straiten the bar. The bar was heated with a blow torch (that's what removed the paint) and then put in a press. A press is just a metal frame with a hydraulic jack in it. It didn't work out quite in the way the farmer wanted. So today he decided to try something different on the remaining bends. That's the cornerstone of ingenuity; Always be ready to try new things. This is what came about.



     There's the bar put above one axle of a front-end loader and below the part of the frame where the loader arm hinges. By putting the bar in where it's held right, the might of the loader can be used to bend the bar right where it needs it. The wood was put in there so that all the forces were nice and square as well as being as close to the bend point as possible. This was the result:

     Not bad at all. While perhaps not as strait as it once was, the bar is quite up to it's task once again. While not a particularly complex goal, even the straitening of  metal bar can be a tricky business. By being a bit crafty, the farmer in this story has saved himself around $250. And that's not a bad days work by any standard.