Good (Late) Morning! 72 F @ 9:15AM. Mainly sunny to start, then a few afternoon clouds. High 81F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph.
While waiting on the flail mower to show up, I tackled a computer problem that's been bothering me for years, keeping me from upgrading to newer versions of Apples MacOS. I'll spare you the details, but my efforts paid off right about the time I got a call from the FedEx man saying he was about a half hour out. Got another call from him when he was at the top of the hill, so I rode out to open the gate and asked him if he wanted to look at the driveway before he drove down it. The gal at the dispatch office said they wouldn't go down dirt roads and I wanted to give him an out, but he said no, it would be fine, as long as I was sure that other trucks had been down there and had got turned around. Several have, so off we went. He got turned around fine, and put the back wheels of the trailer up on the concrete apron so the tractor and the truck would be on the same plane. He moved the pallet with the flail mower on it to the back opening, the forks slid in perfectly, and up she came, easy as pie. I soon had the load out and down and he was on his way after the usual signature. By then it was about 2PM and nearly ninety degrees, but there was a light breeze and the sun actually felt good on my skin. So I started in unpacking, first cutting off the plastic wrap to see what I was dealing with.
Surrounding the mower was an angle iron cage, and through it I could see at least three FedEx shipping labels adhered to various parts. So I sat down and started scraping them off with my fingernails, mostly getting them off a piece at a time. Then came the adhesive remover and nitrile gloves, as one was actually stuck on the slides for the side shift mechanism. That done, I retrieved the package of instructions and retreated to the comfort of my office to read through them, only to discover that they were very brief, and illustrated with postage stamp photos and drawings. And the English was not so good, good thing since it didn't take that long to review. The "easily removeable" frame was, with a power bandsaw, and it was off after only four cuts. Pity the poor guy that had to go after it with a hacksaw, but the welds holding it together could probably have been beaten into submission with a small sledge. The offset slide assembly was steel banded to the pallet, and although the instructions cautioned to wear steel toed boots when operating the flail, and I usually do wear them when working around equipment, I didn't appreciate what would happen until I clipped the last band and the assembly made a lunge for my running shoe clad feet. I was just plain lucky that the 3-point brackets held it off the ground far enough so as not to crush my toes, but it set the tone that this was not going to be a friendly machine. I changed into my boots and found that I'd need to flip the hundred pound assembly over to get it into the proper orientation, then lift it up and onto the mower housing to bolt it on. First I had to remove a trailer jack type leg on the housing, simple as it was held on with just a pin and clevis pin. After squinting at the photo one more time to satisfy myself I understood how it was supposed to fit, I heaved the thing up and slid an alignment punch through one of the bolt holes at one end, then pushed a bolt through on the other. I then spent the next hour laying in the gravel reaching up between the pallet and the mower housing to get the provided washers, lock nuts, and backing plates onto the bolts. That would have been much easier if I didn't have to reach through the steel plate rock guards hanging down from the back of the housing, most of which had sheared edges that were left sharp. The reach to the upper bolts was such that I had to be flat on the gravel with my face smashed right up to the housing to reach, so I can now say I'm intimately familiar with that mower. :laughing: All that screwing around was not accomplished painlessly, as the guard plates made my arms look like I'd lost an argument with RS's entire cat family and I'd managed to smash one fingernail when the socket wrench slipped off. :yell:
Next came attaching the top link mount, which only weighed a few pounds but for which no washers were provided. Well not quite, one bolt did have a washer on it, enough to demonstrate that they all should have. Digging through the washer drawer ate up another fifteen minutes, longer than it took to actually bolt the part on. Then came the 3-point pins, also void of washers, but the same drawer yielded some right sized but rusty volunteers. Finally it was time to connect the drive shaft to the gear housing, and I got to meet my first push button type PTO coupling. The springs on these were really stiff, and one wouldn't move at all without first being persuaded by a mallet and drift. I quickly decided that that one should go onto the gearbox, gave both sides of the spline a nice spray of grease, then went at it. As is usual with these sorts of things, it was heavy and at an odd position to hold, and the darn safety guards all but prevented access to the push button. But after struggling and
for half an hour it finally slid home and the button clicked into position.
Looking up at the clock it was only 5PM, then I remembered that there's been a time change while I was on the road and I hadn't yet set the old clocks in the garage and house. No wonder I was so hungry! So that was it for the mower for yesterday, but not for the day. Or should I say night, because round two of the computer problem called for downloading and installing the latest version of the OS, and that couldn't start until midnight when the satellite data caps lifted. So I had some dinner, watched some TV, and went to bed. Woke up at about 12:30AM and started the install, napped again for an hour or so and it was less than half way through, napped some more and woke up again, and so on until about 3:45AM when the install completed. The thing managed to reboot OK, but the first thing to greet me was a list of applications that had been disabled because they weren't compatible with the new version of the OS. And as I poked around I found more apps that would also need updating. But email and web browsers worked, and I was able to snag an updated version of the text editor before the data cap came crashing down again at 5AM. So I went back to bed and slept fitfully 'till about 9AM. Probably get to repeat similar late night shenanigans tonight as well in order to get the job done, but I'm happy so far.
A little later I'll go over the flail with a wrench to make sure nothing vibrated loose during transport, then check the gear housing to see if they put oil in it at the factory. The instructions were vague on that point, but my guess is they didn't because there was none splattered over the outside.:confused2: But hey, what do ya want for twenty eight hundred bux? Then it'll be off on the Yamaha again to pick up the truck and take that VW bus test ride. Maybe I can find a way to drag the laptop along and steal some bandwidth at Panera to finish up those upgrades.
Hang in there guys, Friday's comin'! :drink:
