I have a lot of fond memory of upright silo's, the day I tossed the cord in and shut the door behind me on the way out of the last one when I'd had enough and never looked back is the first one, and all the rest are the days I knocked the silo's I demolished down, other than that no others come to mind.
I'm not sure who invented cement stave silo's but whoever he was, I've often thought if we all could go back in time, he's definitely one who needs to have his a** kicked, that's one invention we all could have lived very nicely without, I can't tell you how many times over the years I've thought of that.
Did you ever drop an unloader while raising it to the top? I came close a few times but if never actually fell, one we ended up filling the silo by blowing silage over it and when we got to that level we let it down or more like it fell about 5 feet onto the fluffy silage and we repaired the cable and winch so we could finish raising it to the top and filling the silo full. Another time the winch gears stripped out and it fell about 10 feet free fall until the gears locked back up again and almost jerked the winch off the side of the silo, it frayed the cable so badly when it jerked we thought it would just snap, that one we also filled to the level of the unloader but we ended up putting in a new tripod, winch, cable and some bands around the silo where the winch was attached, I was pretty sure I'd see that one crash to the bottom but luckily for me it didn't, I was holding the string at the top that was attached to the unloader so it didn't spin while we raised it and the string was caught around the platform I stood on, the last time we ever let the string hang outside the silo and we also never wrapped it around our hands after that either, when it went free fall it almost jerked my hand off, lucky for me I had a glove on and it took that right off my hand along with a lot of skin, but it left my fingers intact and not broken, after that we always pulled the winch cover to see how the gears looked before raising any unloader. As for not affording repairs, I did most of the fabrication work to rebuild the parts myself, we also put bearings and stuff in and rebuilt paddles and augers myself, I even built a few augers from scratch, so parts wasn't a big issue, the problem came in order to "cobble" we ended up climbing the silo so many times to get the parts to fit, finally we ended up with an unloader that was no longer factory but mostly shop built, but the rust gets everything in the end, at the end there was nothing to put parts on anymore, it was so rusted out and shot, even the main frames were pretty well gone and that's when we quit working on them. As for pitching out silage by hand.................... its called a skid steer out of a bunker and that's as close to by hand as I got, I'd pitch out wagons with broken aprons, around the blower to clean up, around the conveyor to clean up but by god I wasn't going to pitch it out of the silo too, that and as many cattle as I had to feed I'd have died with a fork in my hand, we usually went from one silo to another when one was broke down and as we fixed on one we usually had another to feed out of, only a few times did we have no silo's to feed out of anymore and had to figure out how to feed cattle and pitched it out, but I'd work around the clock on the unloader before that happened. AAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhhhhhhhhh the good old days and the memories that flood back from the past.
