Good Morning!!!! 55F @ 5:00AM. Plenty of sunshine. High 72F. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph.
Looks like it's gonna be a nice day, except for the wind. Might have to water down that burn pile if the wind gets too strong.
Maybe something like
this would help with that heavy tank, Drew. And other heavy things as well?
Made some more changes to the claim yesterday, and will check it again this morning. The website does some sort of processing on the form that seems to take a few hours, and from what I've seen what you put on the form doesn't always find its way into the finished product.
Two days in a row now I've gotten delivery notices from the post office and then no package shows up. Then when I check status they show as being delayed or still in transit. More software screw ups. And I bet somehow they'll try to blame it on CV19!
The electric company cut a steep trail along the power line right of way, and the tree crew piled a bunch of slash near the bottom when they were out last month. The idea of all that fuel below the house kept nagging me, so yesterday I put the new grapple on the tractor and moved it to a burn pile. Everything was going pretty well until I got the tractor stuck, then spun the front wheels enough to wallow out a hole and got really stuck. Soft ground and mud. Tried to row it out with the FEL, but the grapple kept slipping. Ended up getting enough of a run at it to pop it out, but the trail is pretty narrow and the drop off on one side is steep and long, so it was an adrenaline enriched process.
There was maybe a 5 MPH breeze when I fired up the pile, which I lit on the down wind side so it wouldn't take off too quickly. But between all the sap in the pine branches, and all the plastic pieces I cut out of the firewood pallets, the flames got pretty big anyway. And there was some pretty black smoke for a while, too, the kind that attracts the wrong kind of attention. I guess nobody was watching, and by noon as I was piling on slash from another pile, the flames had moderated, and the smoke was back to the usual white. The feeder pile was grayhound bus size, and I was surprised at how fast I was able to get through it all. The grapple works a lot better for that kind of work than the 4in1 bucket ever did. Also found four or five good sized tree trunks in there that'll make some nice firewood. That was the first real work I've gotten out of the new-to-me tractor, and I feel like I'm getting used to the controls and feel of it on the slopes, so I'm not as nervous. Still very slow going when it comes to moving heavy stuff though, and a couple of those oak trunks definitely qualified as heavy. Nice not to hear the popping and groaning coming out of the FEL like it did on the old tractor.
I had to limb up one of the trees I found, and started off with the Makita chainsaw. Somehow the chain jumped off the bar, and when I tried to get it back on, the part that goes in the slot in the bar got bent or burrs, so the chain wouldn't move. I already had an 18" bar on hand so I could use the same chains as the small Stihl saw, so just ended up putting it on instead of trying to fix the 14" chain the saw came with. FWIW,
this is the bar I ended up with, and it seems to work pretty well.