Broke!

It's a scary testimony to the times in which we live - with a title tag like that, the mind pretty readily heads towards financial peril. So far we are weathering that storm as well as anyone can expect... no, what I'm talking about is one of my lift pins for the disk/drag. For some reason this hardened steel pin decided that the threads had held long enough and they should strip out.
Of course - if you have ever done anything with machinery - apparently the lift pins talk to the little nuts and bolts in the factory... just like the little guys learn how to escape you fingers when you are working on a car and roll to the exact geometric center of the vehicle - the lift pin knew to complete the road to failure in the middle of a disk-ing job in a soggy spring field. The good(ish) news was this minor issue manifested itself on Saturday around lunch - so I had two options to try and rescue the disk - either pull a lift pin from another implement as a temporary replacement or simply pick up another pin at the tractor store and just continue on the next day. The sparkling shiny second photo gives away the choice I made since I was expecting a friend over for a small woodworking project in the afternoon.
What never ceases to amaze me about this very trivial issue is no matter how many extra parts I keep around for this very sort of thing - you can never have everything... the extra pin I had on hand was pulled from "something" a while ago and has a VERY short threaded section... I guess "Be Prepared" should really change to "Be MORE Prepared"... which I apparently wasn't when I got the new pin installed and headed out to field on Sunday... but that's another story...