January at last!

Christmas is over. The Rellies have all gone home. Life is coming back to normal. Gosh, what all has been happening on the corn burning front? Well, the Traeger pulled a little trick on me a couple of times. The way my corn burner works is to have two motors to move the corn. It has a cup motor on the top, which is a geared down motor that attaches to a shaft via a couple of allen-set screws. The cups rotate into the corn hopper, fills, and then dumps down into the feed auger which is driven by the second motor.

Well, a little Traeger trick, is for those allen-sets to loosen up. It did it to me once last year as well. So, it's not quite often enough to be the first thing you think of when you are problem solving. You go down into the basement and the fire is out. Huh? Check the hopper. Plenty of corn. Huh? Check the burn pot. No fresh corn waiting to feed into the pot. Huh? So the first thing you think of is that some stalk of corn has lodged in the feed system. (Well, OK, you guys burning clean corn don't think this first. I have to though!) So if the feed system is jammed up, the first thing you do is empty the hopper. A few buckets and some cursing and promising to build a corn screener later, the hopper is empty only to find the feed system is just fine, not stuffed up. Well, it fooled me twice. Last year and this. I never claimed to be a quick learner.

All it takes to fix it, is to run the feed motor and stop at a particular spot. The two couplings in the photo above have a shaft in the middle of them. The allen screw tightens down against this flat spot. The trick for you is to figure out where the flat spot is on the center shaft. The problem is with the allen-set on the black part of the shaft. It has come loose. The silver part of the shaft has two of these allen-sets. More than likely the flat spot on the shaft will be underneath one of these two allen-sets. If you look really close, with a bright light behind the shaft, on the front side of the Traeger, and you, on the back side, with the feed running, will be able to spot the flat spot by looking real close at the narrow gap between the silver and black part of the shaft. Once you have done it once, you will see it sounds tougher than it is. The tricky part, if you are working alone, is shutting the feed off at the right moment. If you miss it, just let it run around again.

So, what I did is tightened the allen-set, on the black block, when it was stopped, directly over the top of the flat part on the inner shaft.

What I plan to do is pickup another allen-set of exactly the same size. I will run that allen-set in behind the one that is in there. The outer one will then lock the inner one from turning itself out.