The Elegant Plumber

Today I plumbed up our new corn planting tender. We apply two different liquid fertilizers as we plant, so we’re setting up a trailer with tanks on it to hold each kind of fertilizer, and then plumbing it so we just have to turn valves to switch between the different kinds.

Tom and I drew a plumbing schematic on a big piece of cardboard, but that master plan disappeared somewhere along the line. Today when I started laying it out I quickly got confused and seemed to have many more plumbing fittings than I needed.

After much head-scratching I laid it all out with little red tubes standing in for the real connections.[1]

Prototype
Prototype

Ah, it’s all starting to make sense now!

Now there was nothing to do but cut the real tubing to connect everything. After a few judicious snips, it looked like this.

The Real Thing
The Real Thing
The Real Thing Again
The Real Thing Again

The plumbing may look a bit messy, but it’s going to be wonderfully simple to use. You’ll open a valve on the left to fill one or the other of the tanks, and then open a valve on the right to empty one or the other of the tanks.

In years previous we had to switch hoses between tanks. Which meant dragging hoses all over the place, tripping over them, splashing fertilizer everywhere while doing so.

This is really going make our corn planting go much smoother.


1. Notice the two short pieces of red tubing duct taped together at the left center of the picture to make a long run? Ah, duct tape, is there nothing you can’t not do?

5 thoughts on “The Elegant Plumber

  1. After I was done I looked at it and thought, “dang, I should’ve gotten two different colors of hose for the inlet and outlet sides.” That would’ve looked so cool!

  2. Saw a little red sports car, today, that apparently had been in an accident and had loose parts. They had fixed it with the blue sky/clouds pattern duct tape. Quite a colorful little car.

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