OK, I have put 100 hours on the
BX22 and felt pretty confident. on how to operate it. I even switched out the truf tires for bar tires after about 10 hours use after I realized that the trufs were useless in mud. Go into and out of some ugly areas with the machine.
One evening last fall I was playing, I mean operating, the tractor. Now we have a creek in the back of the property that serves as the rear property line. The creek normally runs 12" to 24" deep and 20' to 40' wide. As one point there is a gentle slope on the creek bed (most areas drop off 2' to 4'). I decided that I needed to get down to the creek and then turn the tractor around and drive out again and then put the little darling in the shed for the night. As it turns out, it was no problem to get the tractor DOWN the embankment. I was even able to turn the machine around. It was then that I discovered that I could not get the little beast UP the embankment. It was 100% mud, the harder I tried, the deeper the machine buried itself. By the time I gave up, both axles were buried. I then decided that I would get the older boys truck, a Ford F-250 Quad Cad Diesel, (The boy and his wife moved back home in August. They sold their home, bought a older home, ripped it down to the foundation and are in the process of rebuilding it, they were going to be in the new home by Christmas; Its now the middle of February and the framing is now just finished) He was on vacation, so I had to maneuver the truck through all of the trees and bushes. It was getting dark, so I managed to scrape the right side of the truck on one of the trees before getting to the creek.
Finally got the truck down by the creek. Almost all of the light is gone. I finally got a tow chain attached to the truck and the tractor (no simple feat as I'm close to sixty and approximately 18" shorter than my perfect weight says I should be) Since I couldn’t operate both the truck and the tractor by myself, I get the bride involved to drive the truck (a lovely, sweet women, but didn't quite understand why I needed to drive down to the creek - the same reason that you climb a mountain, because its there)
Anyhow, trying to coordinate her with the truck and me on the tractor was like all of our experiences with doing wiring together, it ended in tears and frustration, and that was just me.
Needless to say, the tractor spent the night in the creekbed.
Now, a luck would have it, the next day we were supposed to get hit with some rain from the leaving edge of a hurricane (Floyd, I think). When we get more that an 1" of rain, the gentle creek in the back becomes a raging river. It goes from 40' wide to 200 ' wide and from 2' deep to 6 to 7 ' deep.
Sooooo - needless to say, not much sleep that night. Between dinging the kid's truck and knowing that a $15,000.00 piece of equipment is about to be flooded or swept away, I wasn't feeling all warm and fussy.
The good part. As it turns out, we were in the middle of having a new septic system installed when I had this brain f*** of a idea to visit the creek. The contractor installing the new system had two JBC model 215 backhoes on the property. Luckly, the bride had been feeding the guys and keeping them supplied with soda and ice tea, so when I stayed home the next morning and asked that come down to the creek and pull out my toy, they didn't even laugh. It took less than ten minutes and toy was put back in the shed so that the mud could dry.
As it turned out, we got over 6 inches of rain from the storm that started later in the day. While the house is 400' from the creek and the creek would need to rise over 12' to get to the house, I have never seen as much rain as we received for those couple of days.
The really dumb thing is that I now have an RTV900 and I know that it wants to see if it can get down to the creek and back out again! Who knows, there may be a drought next July!
