Another triumph for the problem solvers
When your favourite cow dies, you are truly devastated, and this is true whether your herd is 20 or 200. When a crop is totally decimated, it’s more than the financial loss, there’s the feeling that so much work and effort has gone to waste.
The ups are just as poignant — small or large triumphs in the show ring or mart, the rosette and the mention in the local paper, or the upped value of your stock.
Great moments for some people will always happen when they are in competition with other humans. These competitors have to be winners, like the 1,000-acre farmer who takes delight in beating down the price of a few acres of summer grazing, even though the savings are totally insignificant to them but important to the small holder.
Yet, such competitive people are often not so good at practical triumphs which don’t involve beating someone else. Overcoming problems or making a particular task easier gives them little pleasure. Their pleasure comes from persuading someone to take on the difficult task, preferably as a favour, out of the goodness of the heart.
Many top company men are just these highly competitive types; and it’s not surprising that practical improvements in some companies are so often low on their agenda.
Ruling people is more satisfying than conquering difficulties.
One such difficulty, experienced by a brilliant farm employee on a large farm, was that of topping up or filling tractor and implement gearboxes.
These gearboxes can often be found in places so inaccessible that it’s difficult to get a spanner onto the filler bolt, let alone find the space for any spout or filler tube.
Farmers with oil pumps struggle to hold the filler pipe in the hole and operate the hand pump on the container which is standing on the nearest piece of floor — often some feet away.
Fred Symes hit on a real problem solver — he converted a fire extinguisher into a pressurised container which discharges oil down a pipe and into a curved filler.
The flow control is the lever on the extinguisher, which has an air line outlet on the side opening.
The canisters are designed to take a pressure of 10psi, and the valve holds the air pressure, so the oil filler is generally ready for instant operation.
The advantages are legion. The filler can be propped close to the gearbox needing attention, and the lever operated easily. The ease of use means that farmers won’t prevaricate about checking and filling awkward items such as steering boxes and other gears tucked away under the driving cab.
Neglect of keeping levels up to the mark, or failing to give the gears a change of lube, takes its toll on reliability, and also on the wallet.
Using this champion workshop innovation (even if it got no rosette) is as good as knocking the opponent down, or even out.
