Getting it Done

Sometimes you just do what you gotta do to get the job done.

If you don’t know what you’re seeing there, it’s an ordinary light switch duct taped to the joystick control on our Hagie sprayer.

I was spraying today. We have a field with marstail coming on in it. Marstail is a scourge around here, if you don’t kill it when it’s small, you aren’t going to kill it. And we have heavy rain forecast for the next 3 days. So we really needed to get it done today.

I made one pass with the sprayer, turned around and hit the switch to turn the sprayer on, and… nothing. Well, that’s not unusual. It’s a poorly designed and poorly positioned foot switch. It’s easy to ‘fat foot’ it and not get the sprayer turned on.

I backed up, started forward again and hit the switch, and… nothing. At this point I knew what was going on. That switch has failed before.

The Hagie cab is tiny. To work on this switch you have to kneel on the grate outside the cab and work jackknifed over door sill, supporting yourself with one hand and trying to work with the other. After a lot of sweating and swearing it was apparent the switch had failed.

The Hagie dealer is two hours away. Going on a parts run would mean not getting the field sprayed today. Tom and I went over to my shop and I cut apart an old 9 volt adapter for its wire (I knew I had saved it for reason!), grabbed an old light switch and a roll of duct tape and headed back to the field.

I crimped the salvaged wires onto the wires on the foot switch, duct taped the light switch to the joy stick, backed the sprayer up again to take another run at it, flipped the switch and…

voilà!

The sprayer turned on and I finished the field before the rain!