Here's why you grease your loader faithfully.

[ultrarunner]

Ha ha! I got my wife a machete for Christmas one year!

I gave my then 67 year old mom a commercial Honda aluminum deck walk behind mower one year for Mother's Day... had a ribbon on it and put it in the living room... that was 15 years ago and she loves her one start mower.

Being commercial only the blade disengages so she doesn't have to restart it every time she empties the catcher...

Boy did I take a lot of greif over that... was told any kind of son would mow the lawn for her or pay someone to do it...

They just don't understand you can't take the farm out of farm girl...

My brothers told me to get a good one and we would split the cost... they had no idea I was buying a $900 mower so it was all on me...

 

[mark02tj]

I gave my then 67 year old mom a commercial Honda aluminum deck walk behind mower one year for Mother's Day... had a ribbon on it and put it in the living room... that was 15 years ago and she loves her one start mower.

How is your mom doing? You haven't written much about her lately. I hope that she's doing well. I almost feel like I know her after all you've written. Plus, she's just about my parents' ages.

My brothers told me to get a good one and we would split the cost... they had no idea I was buying a $900 mower so it was all on me...

Did they ask? That'll teach 'em! :laughing:

 

[ultrarunner]

Thanks for asking... Mom is 82 and doing remarkably well with most things... memory is getting to be a problem... especially obsessing over appointments that are weeks away... she is not a person to ever be late or miss an appointment.

She absolutely loves going out to my brothers farm/ranch... always something she can do. His old stick-built garden shed didn't have an electrical outlet so I ran EMT Conduit and put one in for him yesterday and she was helping me fish the wires through and holding things... that was after she finished watering the plants... always brings treats for the horses and I swear they can spot here coming.

You might remember the odyssey of her 2001 Corolla getting stolen last year that we were able to recover many months later?

She was not ready to give up driving so I found her a 2011 Corolla S that she really likes... especially the remote key fob... thinks it is the greatest thing ever! I drive the 2001 to work most days because it is so economical and since I bought it back from the Insurance.

Only drives to the market and church... won't drive anywhere else which is probably best with how aggressive people are in the SF Bay Area highways... never a ticket of accident and we don't want to change that.

She is happiest helping out and finds the farm/ranch can always use a helping hand... so we spend at least an afternoon there each week.

 

[dickfoster]

Thanks for the info...

You are well versed in many topics here at TBN...

If you don't mind me asking... how did you become so knowledgeable?

If you're talking to me, I don't know much about tractors. Mine has a sum total of about 70 hours on the clock and that's about the sum total of my tractor knowledge too. I do however read a lot and I've done a lot of other stuff and got to be a quick study out of sheer necessity. In electronics it was either keep up or perish and things changed fast in that field. A lot of the stuff I picked up rock crawling and building my rock rig seems to have paid off with the tractor. Mechanics is mechanics I guess. The rest is common sense and being too stupid to know that I couldn't do something so everything I've learned I taught myself in the school of hard knocks.

 

[dickfoster]

On the safety side, make sure you are wearing good leather gloves when you hold the hose. I've seen what a grease wound looks like. The grease pierced a weak spot on the hose and of course, pierced his hand near the thumb. Very ugly wound, for an ugly long time. Almost impossible to get the grease out of the flesh. Lucky to have his hand into his old age.

That's a good tip. Maybe it'll help keep my hands a bit cleaner too.

 

[dickfoster]

Ha ha! I got my wife a machete for Christmas one year!

I got mine a pressure cooker for her birthday one year and have yet to hear the end of it. Hey, she had said she'd always wanted one like her mom had so it wasn't really my idea. She swapped it for a leather jacket and I've been the brunt of jokes ever since. I got her a Sears Best and a cookbook to go with it. No appreciation. Women?

 

[ultrarunner]

Guess it all depends on the woman... and how do you really ever know.

Mom was thrilled when they were starting out and bought each other a washing machine from Sears as their Anniversary present...

I bet the women I work with would put up such a fuss over an appliance gift you would never hear the end to it.

Why is OK for Dad to get a lawnmower but not Moms?

I work with a lot of Nurses... the ratio is probably 25 women for every male employee... some of the break room discussions get very involved with others chiming in on how to correct bad husband behavior...

One of the Docs I work with has a horse boarding barn... with tractors... I can always tell when he had a good tractor day off... his spirit is renewed... his wife has even said when tensions develop that he should go and do a tractor project to settle down... in all fairness, she owns the tractors as the the boarding barn bought them!

 

[oldpilgrim]

One of the best presents I ever got from my parents was a cast iron bathtub, for my bathroom remodel.

 

[JRobyn]

My wife's favorite anniversary present was the Stihl Magnum backpack blower I got her a few years ago. She IS a farmgirl!

 

[sixdogs]

We grease our backhoe and skid steer every day when using them hard. Now I don't grease it if I am just doing a ten minute task but if I am going to go do something that takes several hours I grease it before I start. Grease is cheap.

I'm the OP on this and learned a couple of things. When I grease the loader when I'm done with it or at the end of the day, the grease flows easier and it's easier to get the grease in the pins. Probably things are warmer and the grease just goes in better because of that. I do this now for that grease reason and also since the loader is already greased when I start up again, the option NOT to grease when I use it again is gone and I am in better compliance with greasing. Just a thought I 'd pass this along.