Good Morning!!!! 48F @ 5:00AM. Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. High 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
Picked up another half inch of rain yesterday afternoon, which meant playing hide'n'seek with the showers while I ran errands in town. It's raining again now, but fingers are crossed for a halt before a pair of buddies arrive on their motorcycles around noon. They're stopping by for a meal and a sleep on their way to Idaho, where one of them will look for a suitable place to retire. Not sure how well that'll work: He's a native Californian and not used to harsh winters where motorcycles hibernate for half the year.:laughing:
Good to hear you're gettin' around a little better, Bill. Just in time to go back to work, huh?:thumbsup:
Glad you decided to hold off on the burn, Claye. Now worth taking the chance on BBQing your neighbor's alfalfa, is it?:laughing:
There are plenty of fish in the sea, Drew. One day the right mermaid will find you irresistible, and you her.
Yesterday's track steer hunt was a mixed bag. The New Holland dealer was a nice guy, but not well informed and he had nothing on his lot to look at. Nothing used, nothing new, and not even some sort of list of used equipment that might be available at other dealerships. He did point me at a nearby rental shop where they had a small Bobcat track loader and rotary cutter for rent, but the cost of that knowledge was more than I paid for the last set of tires on the truck. And I'm not sure I'm much interested in Bobcat's offerings anyway. I did learn that the "skid steer" adapter on the track steer's loader arms is the same one Kubota uses, so I'll be able to keep my 4-in-1 bucket and forks when I sell the tractor, so that in itself was worth the visits. And that same rental outfit had an auger, a trencher, a big rock hammer, and various buckets to loan as well. So my plan now is to start calling around to find a dealer with stock on hand to look at, and also call other rental outfits to find other makes of track loader of more interest. One thing the dealer and I did agree on was that the track loader would be much more suitable for use on the terrain around here, so that was worthwhile validation as well. I do have to take that with a grain of salt, though, as it's in his best interest to agree with a customer: He wants to sell another track loader!:laughing:
As far as contaminating the hydraulic fluid with that from a piece of rental equipment, why couldn't you just hook up the input line from the loader to the implement, then flush the implement's oil out the return line into a bucket until it ran clean?. Might cost a few gallons in oil, but it would also keep the junk out, and perhaps tell a story if one was to look in the bottom of the bucket after the oil was transferred to the recycle container.
Lots of shaking of heads and staring at shoes at the Kubota dealer when I showed them the broken tractor axle yesterday. They all could see how the crack had been propagating long before it failed, and that the notch and reduced diameter at the crack location was the cause. The new part was dimensionaly the same, but did feature a radius on one side of the thread relief notch. One of the techs did a search of Kubota's knowledge base for similar failures, but no surprise it didn't turn up anything. They'd never heard of the FEL mount failures, either, even though several other instances were documented at here on TBN and other tractor sights, and the new mounts came heavily reinforced right from the factory. No offers to contact anyone up the Kubota chain, either. So it's good to know the new axle will fit and get the tractor going again, but it's not enough to change my mind about keeping it, or eliminating Kubota as the manufacturer of it's replacement. I did make a mistake when I failed to order a replacement nut for the axle, which of course was not in stock at the dealer. But with this week's continuing rains, there's no hurry getting the tractor off the jack stands, as I want to give the grasses and weeds at least another week to grow and hopefully dry out, and even then I'm giving some thought to making the next and hopefully last mowing this year with a rented track loader.
I've been buying replacement parts for the Femco sprayer from a local outfit that makes upscale sprayers, and they didn't let me down yesterday when they supplied a replacement hose barb for a failed plastic one. In brass. See, Drew, you're not the only one disappointed in the modern miracle of space age plastic everything.:confused2:
If the boys arrive today according to plan, we'll all ride down to the Sierra Nevada brewery for lunch and then wander over to another buddy's who does the custom work. Time to check on his 4WD Cadillac project, anyway.
TGIF gang!:drink:
