TheMadOne
Platinum Member
I'm in the market for my first tractor, to be used primarily for:
Gravel road Maintenance(Roughly 1/4 mile long in total, with the worst bit being a +/-200FT hill, I usually pay someone to do this every 2-3 years, when the hill starts to really try and eat my car, costs about 800-900 for just the hill, usually another thousand or more from each of us that share the main drag)
Snow clearing the same 1/4 mile(I have a walk behind big box snow blower, it's on it's last legs after half a decade, and my neighbors are both physically unable to do much snow removal, they're both 70+ years old)
Gathering and stacking firewood.(I've been doing this with a combination of an old Dakota pickup and elbow grease, the former's been a champ, but I'm running out of the later)
Additional one time tasks that I have now: (I expect things to be added as the current ones get done, hopefully at a manageable rate)
Clearing brush and back filling for a parking area.
Tearing down the remains of two old outbuildings and filling in the small basement of one, basically moving a lot of steel and concrete blocks.
Building a swale so that my neighbor's destructive land management practices don't further harm my driveway.(He took over the farm up the hill from me a decade ago and removed the timothy grass border around the fields, leaving the water nowhere to go but down through the woods and flooding my driveway)
Building a woodshed.
I own an eXmark zero turn, so no ambitions of mowing the 3ish acres of grass with this.
I'm gonna go with Kubota, since I know the dealer, and trust them(Hoobers). They're also the closest to me, about 15 miles away, and I pass them going to and from work. I've sat on a Mahindra, but the area dealer has only carried them for two years and don't stock parts. The Kioti dealer is a bit of a hike, and seems to be a similar situation as the Mahindra one. The John Deere dealer is...I have a bad taste in my mouth from dealing with them when I ran my old lawn mowers. Their service department seemed to always have an attitude about the guy trying to get parts for a 20 year old mower. Like I wasn't worth the time I took from them.
I'm looking at the L models right now, I've sat on pretty much everything but the Ms, and the Ls are the only ones I found comfortable, the B and BX models both felt cramped.(I'm a..."big"...guy, with size 15 feet.) The BX models seemed light for a grader.
Is the 3301 worth the money over the 2501? Roughly 2500 bucks between them.
Also, are OEM forks a good idea? They seem expensive vs the aftermarket ones.
Gravel road Maintenance(Roughly 1/4 mile long in total, with the worst bit being a +/-200FT hill, I usually pay someone to do this every 2-3 years, when the hill starts to really try and eat my car, costs about 800-900 for just the hill, usually another thousand or more from each of us that share the main drag)
Snow clearing the same 1/4 mile(I have a walk behind big box snow blower, it's on it's last legs after half a decade, and my neighbors are both physically unable to do much snow removal, they're both 70+ years old)
Gathering and stacking firewood.(I've been doing this with a combination of an old Dakota pickup and elbow grease, the former's been a champ, but I'm running out of the later)
Additional one time tasks that I have now: (I expect things to be added as the current ones get done, hopefully at a manageable rate)
Clearing brush and back filling for a parking area.
Tearing down the remains of two old outbuildings and filling in the small basement of one, basically moving a lot of steel and concrete blocks.
Building a swale so that my neighbor's destructive land management practices don't further harm my driveway.(He took over the farm up the hill from me a decade ago and removed the timothy grass border around the fields, leaving the water nowhere to go but down through the woods and flooding my driveway)
Building a woodshed.
I own an eXmark zero turn, so no ambitions of mowing the 3ish acres of grass with this.
I'm gonna go with Kubota, since I know the dealer, and trust them(Hoobers). They're also the closest to me, about 15 miles away, and I pass them going to and from work. I've sat on a Mahindra, but the area dealer has only carried them for two years and don't stock parts. The Kioti dealer is a bit of a hike, and seems to be a similar situation as the Mahindra one. The John Deere dealer is...I have a bad taste in my mouth from dealing with them when I ran my old lawn mowers. Their service department seemed to always have an attitude about the guy trying to get parts for a 20 year old mower. Like I wasn't worth the time I took from them.
I'm looking at the L models right now, I've sat on pretty much everything but the Ms, and the Ls are the only ones I found comfortable, the B and BX models both felt cramped.(I'm a..."big"...guy, with size 15 feet.) The BX models seemed light for a grader.
Is the 3301 worth the money over the 2501? Roughly 2500 bucks between them.
Also, are OEM forks a good idea? They seem expensive vs the aftermarket ones.