Otis knew a man, a licensed technician named Ray Dunlap, who serviced grain drying equipment for half the county, and Malik got in touch with him before he’d even finished hauling the last dryer home. Once all 14 units were parked in rows behind the farm, Malik didn’t try to fix all of them. That was the first decision that mattered. He walked the row again with Otis and later with Ray. And instead of asking which dryers could be repaired, he asked a different question. Which parts across all 14 were actually good?
He pulled the fans that spun freely and checked true. He set aside motors that ran clean on a bench test. He kept controls that looked serviceable, setting them aside as candidates to be checked against a known reference rather than assuming a working display meant an accurate one. He built a rough inventory laid out on shelves in the shop of exactly what he had to work with, separate from any particular dryer shell. Parts only made it into the build once their electrical and mechanical specifications could actually be verified for the configuration Malik was putting together. Anything that merely looked like it would bolt in stayed on the shelf until it checked out.
Out of 14 machines, he and Ray figured there was enough good hardware mixed and matched to get one small unit running properly, with Ray handling everything related to the burner, ignition, fuel system, and wiring himself and Malik handling the mechanical assembly and airflow work under Ray’s direction, with anything electrical checked and completed under Ray’s supervision before it ever got tested live. It took most of the summer. Ray came by on his own schedule, checked every fuel connection twice, tested the ignition system thoroughly before anyone loaded a single kernel of grain into the unit, and made clear to Malik exactly which parts of the process were his to touch and which weren’t.
By late summer, they had one small dryer running. It heated. Air moved through it the way it was supposed to. Malik ran the first test batch, corn pulled at a modest moisture level from a neighbor willing to let him experiment with a small amount. The batch came out of the dryer noticeably drier than it went in. Malik felt like he’d solved the whole problem in one summer.
Then he pulled samples from different parts of the batch to check the way Ray had shown him instead of just trusting one grab sample from the top. The numbers didn’t match each other. Grain from one part of the batch tested too wet still. Grain from another part had dried past where it needed to be, over-dried enough to worry about quality if it kept happening. One sample had told Malik the grain was drier. Several samples told him whether the dryer had actually done its job.