Learn something new every day

I got a chance to try something today.

When I bought my tractor, had a chain hook welded on the backside of the backhoe bucket. The hooks on the top lip of the FEL bucket get a lot of use. I might use them for picking up a large log or a round bale or pulling small stumps or anything else heavy. The Backhoe doesn't have the same kind of capacity as the FEL. It also has a lot of leverage on the tractor. So I am not going to pickup the kind of weight with the backhoe hooks as the FEL.

I have had the tractor for a while but I haven't had much use of that hook on the backhoe bucket and I was wondering if I ever would. I moved a big blower with it once and is was kind of handy as the blower was bulky.

The power company came by recently, or at least their tree contractors. They have been cutting trees under the lines across the road from us. It has been a windfall of wood. But a lot of it was down a significant embankment. I could have cut it in place but the slope wasn't a great place to cut and it was a lot of trips to carry it out as individual peices. So I used the backhoe and a chain to lift and pull the the logs out in reasonable lengths. The boom cylinder doesn't have the right leverage to lift a log, particularly with the dipper stick extended much. But there is a lot of power to pull something to the tractor. And when it is in close to the tractor, I can get the boom vertical and the dipper can lift the log, craning it. It was a nice way to recover these logs. The weren't real big, 12 to 18 inch diameters and 10 to 12 feet long. Using the backhoe was a lot more fun than lugging them up by hand.

I definitely could have done it by hand. And it took a while to get the backhoe out of winter storage and onto the tractor. In part I want to do it this way to try out craning with the backhoe. If I don't try something when it is relatively easy, I may not have the skills or experience to do it when it is a necessity.

Cylon Detector

I got to use my cylon detector today

Actually, it is a mold for making a concrete counter weight for my tractor. It helps the tractor by preventing a heavy weight lifted on the bucket arms from lifting the rear tires off the ground. Actually, hopefully, it is heavy enough to transfer some of the weight from the front axle to the rear. The rear of the tractor can handle a lot more weight than the front. It seems odd that the heavy lifting arms are on the front...

The block of cement fits into the three point hitch on the back of the tractor. I used a 3ph draw bar with a bumper hitch mounted on it to attach the weight to the tractor.

The Draw bar and hitch fit into the cavity in the bottom of the block. There is a pair of eight inch long 3/4" bolts embedded in the block that hold it all together.

On the front, there is a receiving hole for the top link.

I also molded a V of rebar into the opposite face as a lifting eye. I am not convinced I embedded it far enough, though, so I haven't used that to lift the block. It makes a great place to hook the trailer's safety chains, though.

I made the counter weight because I was often unloading and moving around heavy bins of material from my trailer. I use a flatbed 5 X 10 trailer for picking up loads of manure and wood chips. Since I use the tractor to get the trailer up into the field where the composting is, I need easy access to to a trailer hitch. If I just need ballast and there weren't the complication of pulling the trailer, I could have just used my box blade as a counter weight. But switching between my trailer hitch and box blade chews up a lot of time. With my new counter weight I can tow the trailer without taking it off. It also means I have the counter weight on when I use the tractor to go across the way to the mill and pickup wood chips. I don't really need the counter weight on for loader work, as I have loaded rear tires. But it helps make the tractor more stable.

And when I am unloading the bins it really makes a difference. Each bin holds three or four bucket loads of material. Even though the bins are far lighter than the bucket, the combined weight of material and bin is enough tip the balance of the tractor. And the bins allow the weight to be further from the front axle, giving it more leverage. It isn't safe, and it isn't good for the tractor. To date I had the choice of partially unloading the bins to keep them light enough or taking the time to switch implements on the 3ph. The new regime is a big improvement.

I still have some work to do. This counter weight is smaller than I really want. It took six ninety pound bags of concrete, so about 540 pounds. I really want a little more than one thousand pounds. The plan is to make a second L shaped block. The L will be inverted and hook onto the original block. That is why there is a lip on the back front of this one. I want to be able to store the next one in a position so I can back up to it slip this one under it and pick it up, doubling my counter weight. That way, I have a reasonable counter weight for loader work and a heavy one for bigger jobs that is quick on and off.

There are a couple things I wish I had done differently. I should have embedded one and better yet two 5/8s rebar rods across the block, sticking out about three inches on each side. These would have allowed me to pickup the block with the 3 ph when it is sitting on the ground. As it is, I will need to set it down on something about twelve inches tall in order to pick it up with the 3 ph. I would also have liked to have a second lifting eye on the back and another on the top. And my top link connection is a little hokey. It is two pieces of pipe embedded in the concrete with rebar around it. It seemed like a good idea at he time, but the pipes need to be longer and deeper in the concrete. I also should have used a concrete vibrator. I have some voids. And I could have done the reliefs for the 3 ph draft arms better. All of these things I thought of right after I poured the concrete.

Oh ya, and I should have made a relief for where the trailer side of th hitch is. There is technically enough room there, but I nudge the block with the trailer almost every time I take it off.

A brown van will haul a ton of poop

My ugly brown $450 van brought home another load of manure. This is a load of horse manure, a mix of horse apples and sawdust. I don't have much of an estimate but am pretty sure it is in excess of 3000 lbs of material. For Jeff, we'll just round it off to a ton of poop.



Last year I got a five by ten flatbed trailer from a friend. It has stake rack sides, about 36 inches tall. I can hold about five and a half yards if I can handle the weight. That's a lot of poop to pitch by hand, though. Last fall I built a pair of bins on pallets so I could lift the poop out of the trailer with the forks on my tractor. The bins are about 5 x 5 and four feet high. The bins do make unloading the trailer lot easier. But with bins that large, it's not hard to over load the tractor. It's not so much the actual weight as it is the distance of the center of mass from the front axle. The bins allow the center of mass to be a lot further out, giving it more leverage. So there is still a lot of hand work getting enough compost out of the bins so I can safely move the bins with the tractor. It's still worth using the bins because the tractor allows me to stack the compost much higher than I could reasonably by hand.



It is nice having these big bins for materials that I can handle in or near full bins worth. The debarker chips from the saw mill across the way are a good example. But I am toying with making some smaller pallet bins for denser materials. If I cut the bin depth by a third I could handle them with less hand work. But then I would need a place to keep the bins I am not using. And unloading three bins is significantly more difficult than two because it requires a different approach angle. I am waiting for inspiration to hit me.

Someone Else's Tractor

I got someone else's tractor stuck. A nice grandmother's tractor. I got it stuck. While she let me use it to get a load of manure. And I got it stuck.

It was a heart rending moment. I was using her tractor to load my trailer full of manure from her farm. It's been cold enough that there was a crust frozen on the manure. Her tractor is a geared transmission, a tricck to drive and not familiar to me. I was doing OK with it at first. My biggest problem was that with the manure pile frozen, I had to break the crust into small enough pieces this tractor could lift. This is an 870 tractor, I am not sure what it's lift capacity is.

So there I was, peacefully minding my own business, when the front wheels slipped off the frozen crust into the soft muck that I had exposed. The manure pile is out behind the barn, down a slope in a kind of marshy area. Looking down, I knew it wasn't going to be good. The criust was at about the half way point on the wheel. I tried backing up, but the crust just broke off and the wheel sank further. I wasn't up to the fram yet, but I knew that if I would be if I kept going like this.

I was a little surprised, I couldn't find a differential lock on this tractor. With that, I probably could have backed out with out much problem. I jiggled around a little more, getting myself in deeper, thinking about the conversation with the grandmother. "Uhm, I think I got the tractor stuck." What would I expect her to do? She doesn't even drive it, her grandson does that for her. She's not going to push it out. And I would be surprized if she had something to pull it out.

It's not like I was even stuck all that bad. Yet. The problem was I was only getting deeper.

The obvious had not occured to me yet. A lot of tractors, the loader can pickup the front end of the tractor. Mine can. I have seen many pictures of tractors for sale demonstrating their continued vigor but pickeing themselves up. But when I planted the bucket flat and tried the down circuit, this tractor could not. I boosted up the throttle and tried again. But htis only proved that more throttle does not equal more hydraulic pressure, just faster flow. Luckily, the lift arms are not a fellas last resort. After maxing out the lift arms, I used the curl to give a little more push. That was enough to get the tire almost out of the mud.

I used a some blocking from the trailer to push a bunch of mud under the tire and set it down. Doing this a couple of times I was able to get the wheel high enough off the mud to get some blocking under the tire and crib it out. And then I was able to back out of the hole.

I was really happy I didn;t need to go tell that grandmother I got her tractor stuck. I finidhed loading the trailer, staying away from any soft areas. About half of it I loaded into the bucket by hand with a fork to avoid taking any chances. I thanked the grandmother for the use of her tractor and the manure, alluded that there were some soft spots out there and took my load of goat poo home before anything really bad could happen.

This is the third load of poo we have brought home with the new trailer. Each time it has been a full trailer load, about six yeards. I'd estimate that each load was close to 2500 lbs. But it is pretty amazing how the pile shrinks. After the first two weeks, the first load shrank by at least a third. That's because it is working, I know. But it is a little disconcerting. All that work, and the pile keeps getting smaller.

Since this is the last laod we'll do this year, we should cove the pile to keep it warmer (hold in the heat). Some of this is pretty fresh and it would be nice if we could get it active enough to use it next spring. The field really needs a lot of amendment.

My latest fiasco waiting to happen

I got an idea in my head last week and it is threatening to not only take over my consciousness but also burst into reality as a full blown action. An action with consequences.

The other day, I was driving along, minding my own business, completely innocent, when I was forcefully hit with something. A tractor. No, I didn't rear end or otherwise vehicularly impact a tractor. Rather, I realized that with some of the projects I have coming up, and some of the plans we have, owning a tractor as opposed to occasionally renting one might be the right thing to do. Particularly if I happen to find one for sale, say on the side of the road... So I stopped and looked at the tractor for sale on the side of the road. Now I am looking into backhoes and getting advice on diesel engines. All from a split second, off hand thought that could happen to anyone. Maybe not you, but probably anyone else. Well, maybe not your neighbors, or someone in your family, but anybody beyond that. Well, maybe not anyone you know, but it could happen, I am telling you, I know.

So, why would I want a tractor? It's not a manhood horsepower thing. The tractor I am looking at is a small to midsized compact utility tractor. It's in good shape, but even on it's best day, it wasn't sexy. It's orange, of all things. I am reasonably sure this is not a midlife crisis. I have a big job coming up that is going to mean a lot of digging. I was planning to do it with a rental tractor, maybe spend as much as $3500 on the rental. Maybe hire the job out for a lot more but get it done quicker. Then there are all the smaller projects I would like to do. Some I could do by hand, some I just would never get to without equipment. And my wife and I would like to be doing more in our backfield to amend the sandy soil and then expand our food growing adventures. Maybe even sell some. We could move a lot faster towards that dream if we had a tractor.

The tractor I am looking at is a 20 year old kubota L2850 with a bucket. It's not young, but it has very low hours. It doesn't have any other attachments I will need though. I most immediately will need a backhoe. But I could also use a tiller, sickle bar, box scraper, logging winch, snow blower or three way plow, hay rake, and I don't know what else.

So, for the past week, I have been looking everywhere for information and advice about tractors. I have been trying to do the numbers to decide if I can make the tractor pay. I have been trying to see if this tractor I am looking at is the right tractor for me. It's still coalescing, so we'll have to wait and see where it goes.

Wish me luck