Almost the End of the Week...
As I mentioned earlier in the week, Monday was pretty chaotic; One would have thought that the rain would have calmed things down because the farmers wouldn't be out harvesting. Wrong... Downtime due to weather means that they can take some time to work on their machines instead, and that makes things extra busy at work! Tuesday was a little more relaxed, and the last two days have been quite a lot calmer.
Mind, for the last couple of days I've been spending most of my time in the back of the store in the shipping/receiving bay trying to get the computer working again. The verdict was the the machine was toast, big time; It was only a P3 machine to begin with, and it only had 256Megs of RAM. While that may have been an unfathomable amount of RAM 15 years ago, these days it's barely enough to run the Operating System, much less do anything useful. Yeah Bill, 640k should be enough for anyone!!! To that end, we've brought in another old machine, but at least this one is a 2.5GHz P4-level Celeron machine, with 1Gb of RAM. It's still not really powerful enough (needs more RAM for some of the bigger apps) but it should work just fine for shipping/receiving. The parts look-up program requires a lot more RAM, but since this machine won't really be used for that purpose, it's not really necessary here.
The problem that I discovered this morning was that the DVD-ROM drive on the machine was buggered. David had given me the old machine, and I was going to strip it for parts before taking the carcass to SARCAN for recycling. Fortunately, I didn't get around to doing so as I wound up needing to swap the DVD-ROM drive from that machine into the "new" machine. Today was a great reminder as to why I never really enjoyed putting new machines together from scratch; Oh sure, building the hardware could be sort of exciting, but the drudgery of loading all the software and drivers and updates just ruins all the fun. That's just the basic stuff, from there one has to add the custom stuff and get it talking to the internal network. David took care of that part, since he's the one who built the network and knows all of the addresses for everything. From what I gather, the very fact that he trusts me to let me work on this sort of thing should be considered a great compliment, as basically no one else has been allowed to before. Maybe he just recognizes a fellow geek, but one who's mature enough to not try to hack the system while installing new stuff. ;)
I also learned some new things about the machinery that we sell yesterday, in this case I learned about the "headers" and how they attach to the various machines. A "header" is the front part of a swather or a combine; it's the part of the machine with the whirling reel that cuts the crop down and pulls it into the maw of the beast. That is, if it's a cutting header (and even from there, there are several different kinds.) Another kind of header is a "pick-up" header, which is what I have on my John-Deere 7700 combine. A pick-up header does just what the name implies; Rather than cutting a crop down and feeding it into the machine, it picks-up a crop that has been previously cut and swathed, and feeds it into the machine. This is all stuff I already knew, what I didn't know was how everything was attached.
There are several makers of headers out there; All of the companies make their own of course, like John-Deere, New-Holland, Massey-Ferguson, etc. But there are also other companies that manufacture headers for other machines; Companies like Honey Bee (which is actually local to me, being in Frontier, the next town south of Shaunavon!) or MacDon, who also sell complete swathers as well as just the headers. My IH-201 Windrower (another name for a swather) has a MacDon header, but I'm not sure if my Versatile 400 has a MacDon or a Versatile header; I'll have to check. In any case, the companies don't make different headers for the different machines; They make all of the headers (of a certain style or size) exactly the same. The header for a John-Deere is exactly the same as the header for a New-Holland, and exactly the same as the header for a Massey. The difference is in the Adapter...
The Adapter is unique to each make, and that's what allows the headers to be used on such a variety of machinery. This is where it can get confusing to someone working in the parts-dept, because you need to know three things: What Model of Header it is, What Kind of Machine it's going on, and Which Adapter is being used. I learned all this from Bill (one of the salesmen) yesterday because this fellow had called in looking for some of the massive springs that hold up the header. I was able to find the header in the parts-books easily enough, but I couldn't find anything like that springs he was trying to describe. I have to give the call over to another person, and afterwards Bill (who helped us both track down the parts) explained how all the pieces were related. Customers forget that the adapter is a separate part of the whole mess, so it's up to the parts-dept staff to figure out what the real story is. It's still a little confusing at the moment, but at least I'm starting to see how everything fits together. :)