Kevin Hursh
Here’s a shout-out and a big thank you to all the parts people who help keep farm equipment running during the busy seasons.
Service techs and mechanics are the front-line heroes, making service calls, answering phones and replying to text messages. There are not enough hours in the day for these people during busy times. Some are absolute magicians.
Meanwhile, the skills of the people at the parts counter often go unrecognized.
Even using your wildest imagination, it’s still often shocking to see the price tag on parts, particularly specialized parts. The people helping us out aren’t the ones setting the atrocious prices we have to pay, although they are on the front line for complaints and snide remarks.
The GPS motor and/or terrain compensation box on our secondary combine gave up the ghost. When we tracked down a replacement, it cost $4,800. Talking to the parts person over the phone, I exclaimed it was more than the old combine. Sorry about that brief outburst.
Parts people work in a world of different models, the need for serial numbers for part upgrades midyear, and schematics that aren’t always that easy to read as they try to decipher just what it is you need. When they don’t have the part at the dealership, they need to track down where and how they can get it.
In the harvest season, we had an abnormally high number of repairs. It often seemed like we were doing more repairing than combining. The list of parts included 80-gauge roller chain that the local co-op didn’t carry, various bearings and pillow blocks, specialized knife guards, combine shoe arms and bolts, various belts and hydraulic hoses.
Sometimes when you call the parts store, the lines are all busy. Other times, you catch a parts person as they are hoping to escape for the day. Most stores have drop boxes, so you can pay for the part and they’ll leave it for after-hours pickup.
After working for many years at a parts counter, some become highly proficient, even remembering the numbers for common parts. Most will go the extra mile to get you up and running again.
A bearing in an idler pulley on the serpentine fan belt decided to fail on our main combine. It wrecked the belt and rendered the combine inoperable. The combine has a Cat engine and parts for this particular engine haven’t been readily available.
The computer showed the needed serpentine belt was at a dealership 2.5 hours from the farm. That’s a lot of wasted time driving, but what else can you do? As far as the idler pulley with various components and two bearings, the computer showed only a couple in captivity and they were both in the U.S.
When I got to the dealership, which I’d never been to before, the belt was there as promised and the parts person had started making phone calls to find out where an idler pulley might be located. After a few dead ends, he remembered the previous owner of the dealership had kept many assorted replacement parts. Sure enough, at a shop across the highway, the fully assembled idler pulley was found in its original box.
“Don’t really know what to charge you,” said the shop owner. “How about $125?”
What a deal! And since he wasn’t set up to take credit cards, he just wrote a name and address on a scrap of paper so we could mail him a cheque. I couldn’t have been happier as I headed back to the farm to get the combine operational again.
