So now we are up to the late spring/summer of 2010 - the big cleanup. Now that I had a tractor and the bed extensions on the PU, I was ready to start clearing out the wood and piling the brush.
Let's talk tractor... Now the guy I bought the tractor off of was an interesting guy - turned out he is the regional Kubota rep who I had met a couple years previous at the state fair - and he only lives like a mile or two from my house. You gotta figure this guy isn't going to hose you on a tractor as it could really come back to haunt him..and indeed it has been just as advertised and well taken care of. Had 950ish hours when I got it. He is close to one of the local dealers (no surprise) and that guy had a trailer he was looking to sell.
The trailer was sort of a mistake as I was totally clueless here. It is 16' and 10k rated. It has enough weight capacity but it is short for the tractor. Plus it was partly not as advertised. The wiring was supposedly new and it had brakes on both axles. Well the wiring was a hash and the brakes weren't even connected. The first time I towed it my controller told me it wasn't connected (WHAT?!?!?!) and it was a bit "interesting" to stop. Plus I was paranoid as it was the biggest thing I had towed. So I tore into it and got the wiring fixed and the brakes connected. I figured out later (no experience to go from...) that the brakes were not working great but did have some braking ability which helped a lot. You can see the combo in my avatar. I saved some money (not enough) but would have been better off buying new and not spending a couple hundred on new brakes and a couple hundred on wiring and a couple hundred on new ramps ... and fixing some minor damage. Live and learn. Take this as a lesson, kids: Buy a new trailer, not used!
In talking with the dealer, he convinced me that forks were what I wanted to move brush around, so I got a set from him along with the trailer. I actually like the guy and got the feeling he just didn't know what condition the trailer was really in as he had only used once in 2-3 years and had got it from his BIL (Shoulda been a red flag there...
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So I used forks to haul brush around for the summer. I tried scooping brush with them, but that is a non-starter. You might get a couple sticks, but the bulk falls off both sides and you get nowhere fast. So what I did was pull up to a pile, drop the forks and get off and load them by hand. I could pile a ton on this way but it was tedious and tiring. ...But it sure worked better than dragging it around by hand!
So the summer came down to an alternating tango of getting the tractor out for one weekend to pile brush, then using the truck during the week to haul a few loads of blocks to my friend's house. Then I'd run out of blocks that were accessible, so it was back to the tractor again to move brush. Wash rinse repeat. All summer.
I was making progress at it. I had started a brush burn pile and it had grown like crazy (at the right edge of the first photo).
This is a look later in May after having done this dance for 6 weeks plus an intensive week of working at it (my vacations are truly memorable...)
You can sort of see the driveway running down the hill on the left side of this pic.
And what the pile of block looked like at my friend's house about this time. That's all oak (behind the older split stuff) and we're only getting started...
Skipping ahead a bit...By the 4th of July the pile had grown considerably... Again, all oak.
You can get around the clearing much better at this point, but the far side of the plateau is still an unholy mess, and there are still more trees to drop. You may notice that grove of poplars at the far edge of the clearing in the first pic. They all had to go as they would just fall on the house eventually. I've seen what poplars do when they get big - they snap off and come crashing down. Not good.
More to come...