Search results

I have had that problem before but it was on a Ford 8830. The pto bearing was bad. In my situation anyway, the bearing would heat up and expand then bind up. After it cooled off it would work. it could be the same thing?

I was looking for the fully fuel injected saw, that was why I was looking at the 500. I have a Husky 562 but oh just does not have any ponies to power through wood, but Stihls can be filed to make a bigger chip too, so I am sure a Smaller Stijl would be better than the Husky. Around here...

I mow the sides of the road for area towns so bees are a huge issue with me. I would kill for a cab!

Yeah I did, but I’m working with industry to get our students hired they gave me an offer I could not refuse. I hate to admit it, but it is a lot less stress and literally twice the amount of money. It is crazy pay, but there is a half million shortage of welders in this country right now so...

Preheat will be a big part of the answer. I would use a temp stick and get it up to 350 degrees (f), get everything down to clean steel, then weld your way back out.

I have have been out of touch for awhile, but was waiting for the Stijl 500 to come out before upgrading my junk Husky 562. I was looking on their website and see the Stijl 461 has been upgraded to a newer model but don’t see a 500 Stijl available yet. Does anyone know the deal on them?

You want to go with a stand alone splitter. Why put all those hours on a tractor engine that costs 6000 to replace when a stand alone engines replacement only costs $100?

Does anyone know what a Perkins would have for fuel fittings. It almost seems like they are A/N fittings but I am not sure. Auto places have not been any help. It originally came with plastic fuel lines with an olive type of nut on the fuel line to make the connection but the mechanical fuel...

Pulsed welding is a different animal all together, but once you get it, we’ll...I will just say it, it is better than sex! it is not for better welds but rather to allow the welder to reduce the heat and thus distortion going into the base metal. It has a slower deposition rate over spray...

I operate a canopy tractor from July 3rd thru September 9th, and it sucks! One word, BEES!!!

One thing to keep in mind is, the bigger the tire, the easier they are to change. This is true of tractor tires too. It is hard to describe here, but I break my tires down with a jack. A floor jack works best, but other jacks do work. You just need to chain the jack down to the rim, then make...

We have a decent house here, and have improved it to the point where every room of the house has been modernized and would meet "Property Brothers" or "Chip and Joanna Ganes" standards. By that I mean, double vanities, double kitchen sinks, a huge great room, wide barn flooring throughout...

I love it...a man after my own heart! And as seen on the make it yourself sub-forum, YES this is something I cobbled together, and it did work. Nothing like a generator and an electric fan to make a ditch mower!

The topic of safety is an interesting one I guess, because I have a different approach to life... I grew up riding the fenders of tractors, and my farmer-neighbors never once shooed me away, or even mentioned liability concerns. But then again, that is why I am a farmer, and mind you, not one...

Granted this is a two person job, but what else would my wife do besides raise 4 children, work as a nurse, and be part-time farmer, but drive the tractor when needed? :laughing: The biggest field I have done is 10 acres with this method, but it actually works pretty good considering I have...

Using a disc harrow would be a HUGE mistake. They have cupped discs to bring soil UP, not down, and that is what you want. You get some leveling with a disc harrow, but you end up picking rocks after every pass to get the job done. I HATE PICKING ROCKS! When I level fields, I land plow to make...

Does anyone really know what the difference is in welding with Three Phase Power versus that of Single Phase Power? I have been told that with 3 phase power the arc is more stable, but since most welders convert to DC I cannot see where that would make a huge difference. Perhaps on some tasks...

Egon has it right I think, but I would not wait five years. I maintain the crown in my road and remove traffic ruts by grading my roads every year. It is just as spring task that must be done. I use a tow behind grader with the blade set at an angle to roll the gravel that has been cast to the...

As most of you know, I am a welding instructor, and with these current times, we must do everything by Long Distant Learning means. We do that through the book curriculum, but also videos. In regards to the latter, I have broken my videos down into (2) different categories; Basic Welding...

We got a cat from Hades. I am not even sure Satan himself would want this cat. We have had it a year, and tried to be patient with it, but it just cannot learn. It gets up on the counters, it gets into everything, and despite being litter box trained, in the last month, about once a week, it...

I think I will rebuild my Kubota. It is 21 years old and has 3100 hours on it. I was using it yesterday and the clutch was jamming up on me. I kept busting it loose, but it is going to need a new clutch soon, so why put it off? With Black Swan Disease here, and time off from work, what better...

What would be your companion tractor? (It is okay to dream here) I made the mistake of buying bulldozers, and I realized too late that they were not good companion tractors to my Kubota. Neither have my skidders... With the bulldozers, they had tracks, but still pushed and pulled. And the...

I had about 1000 people coming to a concert on our farm last year, so to make the place look good, I cobbled together a ditch-bank mower. I used a fan, a 2x4 and a generator. Total cost was $0. It was crude, but worked. :-)

My Mom never said I was a bad kid, just very "active". Over the last four years, (3) bouts of cancer had really slowed me up. For those that do not know, cancer is funny in that it consumes 3 times more energy to fight, even when the body is at rest, so trying to work, can really cripple it...

I wonder if Bushog will get back to me? I just sent them an email because as I was tearing down my old Bushog mower, what I thought was a #605 bushog, had a part number that said #6200. The 6 makes sense as this is a 6 foot mower, and being an old square back Bushog, I thought it was a #605...

I write about size and dimension because it is the variable that does not change. Weight is another matter entirely. It would be foolish to buy a tractor based upon weight because it can and should be changed depending upon the work at hand. A tractor owner can buy wheel weights, have fluid...

I have hundreds of acres yet I get plenty done with my L2500 series Kubota Tractor. I never see myself getting a bigger tractor. Bigger is not always better. 1. My Grandfather had a Ford 900, so the implements that we have, are sized for that. While I have the land base to justify a bigger...

Last year I noticed, a White Pine that I had worked around forever, had a big wood pecker hole about 20 feet up the tree. This meant bugs were inside, and it was dying. I could see the tree from the house, and for whatever reason, my wife loves single trees silhouetted in the distance, so I...

We like our ducks here, partly because they LOVE to eat ticks, partly because they take care of slugs, some because they eat frogs and toads, but absolutely LOVE them because they eat snakes. Since having ducks, I have yet to see a snake where they roam. We do not have poisonous snake here...

I put new rear tires on my tractor yesterday. As for details, the old tires were original, bought with the Kubota 2500L tractor in 1999, so they were on the tractor for 21 years, or 3000 hours. I did not do the front tires because I replaced those a year ago. I bought the 11.2-24 tires from...

They are very baggy, nylon pants... Katie admits that when she met me, she went a little overboard on clothes and shoes, but she had never been allowed to dress in fashion, which is something she loves. She was not even allowed to decorate her house; he had to decorate it, in swords and crap...

I just use earthen humps on an angle, terminating the downhill ends with rip-rap to keep erosion at bay as it diverts road surface water into the ditch. I then put an rock check dam in the ditch, across the ditch, to prevent ditch erosion. (These can be seen in the photo) I do that just because...

Tips for Logging (Many while alone). I have always logged alone, and so here are a few tips I learned over the years to make production more efficient, and in some aspects, more safe. 1. Know your saw. For instance, when logging with a skidder, I know my saw can last for (2) twitches before...

The one and only time I have ever rolled my tractor, and this is in 40 years of operating, and mowing the sides of the road for several towns to boot; was in a field with a roll-over plow. I was on the outside edge of a 9% grade, and had just come around a corner. Because there was a sheep...

Like OldPath05 said, it is hit or miss. In some places I could take a bucketful, but not in other places. BUT...the working face of my pit faces North and not South, so that is why it is what it is. With all the snow we got, it is just easier to wait until it is all thawed out really. But my...

I just took some quick pictures so the quality is not that good, but you can see the corner-cut-outs that I was talking about. Well at least the tractor ones and the shamrocks. You can also see how the baseboard "flows" around the room. As I said earlier, it was just my way of using a boring...

I have always cut wood alone. I cut a fair amount of wood. For a real logger, it is not much, but for a firewooder, it is quite a bit, averaging around 300-400 cord per year. Since starting out 30 years ago, I have been cut (3) times. All have been minor. The first was when I had my saw kick...

Hey thanks, I try and put a lot of thought into what I do before I do it. As for thermometers and flow controls, I do have them. I was not home when they ran the pex for my floor so they ran various lengths, where as I keep each loop the exact same. That meant not only do I have flow controls...

Maybe...the manual says 55 Brake Horse Power but I have not done the bore and stroke calculations to see what it is. It does kind of suck that this is a high speed engine instead of slow speed (4000 rpm at full power instead of 1800 rpm), but it is what it is, and I got what I got. Not really...

One of our best trailers was a manure spreader that we modified. We kept the live-bed, but moved that by a lever-hand crank instead of being wheel-driven. We then put our wood splitter on the hitch and could toss firewood right from the wood splitter into the bed of the trailer, then at the wood...

150 pounds is pretty good pressure, especially considering that they had superheated steam towards the end of steam trains on the railroads. With steam expanding 1700 times in volume, there is a lot of force at play, so you can do some significant work with it. More so with superheated steam...

I was looking at this, and it would be possible to home-build. With a little old equipment mash-ups, you could get the track system, and turntable, then add some winches, and fabricate the boom, bucket and cable system. I know you can buy brand new, vertical tube ASME boilers that look just...

Most likely 60 pound. If they did a lot of heavy hauling they MIGHT have used 90 pound. My local railroad put down 90 pound from a bigger railroad junction to a grain mill since they were hauling heavy grain cars, but 60 pound rail for the rest of the line. Regional railroads would most...

I have an old engine, and to get long service life (30,000 hours) the company had to upgrade the engine. So they increased oil capacity to 28 quarts, and added a secondary oil filter. That is okay, but the secondary filter is a real pain for me, so I was thinking about eliminating it. Obviously...

I have a Wallenstein Timber Talon. It comes with a Log Loader, Backhoe, and Post Hole Auger, and Dump Trailer. I have added an upside down woodsplitter, feller-buncher, grader blade, seed spreader, etc. They are expensive, but it take all the work off the tractor, and put it on the trailer...

Hey thanks for the kind words about Katie. I never thought of her dressed in such a way, as her being a "school teacher". I am not saying the moniker does not fit well, it was just when I took that photo, she was a banker. This is no joke: her customer service rating at that bank was always...

And you wonder where I get my like of women-in-miniskirts from...I think it is an inherited appreciation! Sadly, my wife just turned forty and she read somewhere where it is unfashionable for a lady over forty to wear a miniskirt, so I might not get to see her in one ever again! Stupid fashion...

Over the years I have dabbled in a few things as hobbies. For instance I have made quite a few of my homemade implements. And back when I was doing classes on farming, I always included a lesson on making your own homemade implements to keep the cost of farming down so that more profit could...

I did this very thing when I made my upside down woodsplitter. I made a "carrier" that had the tank and fittings (plus my seat for my woodsplitter), and have never had any problems. I have never had any issues with overheating, but I was not exactly working it to death just splitting firewood...

As for a grader, I built a homemade one as well. I plan to make a much, much better one soon. I say that because for all my life I have used a tractor to plow snow, and just this year realized I was doing it backwards. That was because this year I used my homemade grader to plow snow out of my...

I use a roll-over plow, then I drag a log sideways over the field. The deep tillage really fluffs up the soil and allows the soil to be moved about. And the log, with its shape, presses rocks into the soil. The bigger and longer the log is, the better grade you will get. A smaller, longer log...

For awhile I was burning wood/coal in a pot bellied stove, so I was thinking a great way to get into 100% mechanization for firewood, would to be to get into firewood chunks. I always have saplings that I want cleared back around the edges of fields, so part of that mechanized idea was to make a...

As you asked, this is what my wife has for a "shoe-barn" now, but as can be easily seen, it is woefully inadequate. Hopefully when I get the new shoe-barn done, it will work a little better for her. It looked good drawing it up, but at the rate she collected shoes, it quickly became too small...

Yesterday after church I was able to work on the Master Bedroom some more. I went up to the sawmill and found some lumber to work with, and I will be darned if it only took me an hour to make the headboard. For those that care about such things, it was made out of Spruce and Western red Cedar...

I have the worst luck! Back when we had very little for logging equipment, we had to put up 25 cords per year in all the stoves that we had. But now that we have a lot of equipment so that 90% of firewood processing is mechanized, we just burn wood pellets instead. I cut enough tree length...

Kind of a follow-up to that post above... My wife was married before, and yet her husband was on the shorter side, so he did not allow my wife to wear high heels because she would then be even taller than him. He was also kind of controlling, and told her how to dress, and bought her clothing...

My wife and I thought we might work on the bedroom of our house. I hesitate to call it the master bedroom because we are not sure if it is going to stay that way. We are working (slowly) on an inlaw apartment too, and so we might take that as a master bedroom when we are done...I am not sure...

And finally, this is the Firewood/Coal boiler that is sitting next to the genset. The good thing about the way this whole thing will be set up is; if the engine is down, or the firewood/coal boiler is not being used, the propane boiler in my house will come on, and circulate warm water back...

This is the 20 KW Pto generator I have to spin behind the Perkins Engine...

This is the 1942 3 phase/1 phase generator in which I am borrowing parts, in order to get it to work.

Here, is a photo of the Reefer Engine as I found it as a barn-find. I know the history behind it, and know it has been sitting for years and years, but thankfully it is in really good shape. You can also see from the photo that it was the chiller that was disassembled, which is pretty common...

A few weeks ago we lost power for 18 hours, but I have a Kubota Tractor and a 20 KW generator, so the kids did not even know the power was out. But as I checked on the tractor now and then, I realized how much heat was being generated...and wasted. I like the PTO generator, but it is too bad to...

Dear Butch, I know you remember that day well, 54 summers ago standing in the rice patty with my father as you heard the thud of a bullet hitting a body. Nanoseconds later you heard the rifle report, and for a split second you and my father knew one of you had been hit, but was not sure which...

Or maybe a 1947 instead of a 1943? I am pretty sure it says US Air Force, but it is pretty rusted up so I could be wrong on either point...

I think the best thing for me to do is, install the gen-set out in an old insulated building I have out back, and hook it up to my pto generator. I have 220 right there so I can back-feed my home. But I also have a wood/coal boiler kicking around not doing anything. I put it up for sale, but I...

I was curious about synchronizing as well. When I was working for the railroad, that was always tricky, getting the multiple unit to sync just right. A few times I got the frequency off...but this was AC Drives and not DC. The DC Locomotives were much simpler, but wheel slip was a lot more of a...

The other day we lost our power, but the kids did not even notice because I hooked up my PTO Generator to my Tractor, and made power that way. But as I checked on my tractor, the engine and generator were pretty warm after running for 18 hours...not dangerously hot, but warm. Well my home is...

Old Norwood...

Well my family finally made it to the trains in the middle of nowhere. I will say that it is something that has to be experienced to understand. I can, and will, give you the numbers, but driving on 100 miles of isolated logging roads has to be done yourself to get a sense of how isolated, and...

Clover...it is a nitrogen fixer so it pulls nitrogen out of the air, and deposits it through its roots, so no need to fertilize. I plant my fields in 50% clover/50% timothy and the deer love it. (I add oats when I sow at 100 pounds to the acre to discourage weeds, but after it is boot high, I...

After a year of Tiny House living (368 days) we decided to move our family of six back into our old house. We tried to sell the house, but after 94 days on the market, having 35 couples looking at it, and having 4 offers that all fell through for various reasons, it was pretty clear that it was...

I have always just run front chains, and in some ways it is best if you are primarily pulling. Running chains on the back, or running four sets of tires chains in primarily pulling applications breaks things, or causes the machine to rear-up...also called "pulling a wheelie". That is silly...

I got an older, cheap pellet stove that is pretty simple. It just has a hopper, an auger, and then a power draft and room blower. Overall I like it, but found that I can dramatically improve its performance, while lowering its operating cost, by mixing whole corn in with the wood pellets. It...

For us it has always been plowing that is the limiting operation since every other operation after plowing is on wheels, or at least rolls. The disc harrow, the planter, even the silage chopper and trucks all roll. But plowing...that is a 100% drag operation, and it requires a lot of momentum...

That is quite the accomplishment! A few years ago we got a grant to build a Heavy Haul Road across our farm. The grant was $9000 and some contractor wanted $7000 to haul gravel out of my gravel pit 1/2 mile away. I told Katie that we had gravel, and we had a way to haul it, but 350 cubic yards...

A year ago we moved into this Tiny house, a 90 year old building that had been vacant for 11 years! The biggest issue was the driveway, 90 years of plowing snow had taken most of the gravel off, and so the driveway was lower than the surrounding soil. This made the driveway pool with water, and...

I know I am a redneck because I.... Used an electric fan and a 2x4 as a boom mower. (In some small amount of way, you must admit there is a bit of genius in doing that though. It did work).

I clear a lot of land, and so I went in a different direction in terms of rakes. I built a 3 point hitch, pin wheel rake with solid teeth and screening. The screening between the wheel rims allows soil to be filtered through, yet windrow the rocks. For areas of heavy limbs and woody debris that...

That is true! :D My wife was a high end banker so we know all the tricks they use to get money out of people. She really struggled because the bank wanted her to push, push, push credit cards, car loans and other financial crap on people. She could look at the financial statements and knew them...

Will animals even eat that much oil soaked hay? (I am only teasing) Yeah it sucks when you go through that much oil. I am glad you got it fixed though. I am also glad you got in some hay too though. That is about average for us too, roughly 104 round bales on 25 acres. I could probably get...

Then why bother? I am not trying to be snide at all here, I am trying to show that this is the fallacy that many people fall into. You speak of making $1135 a year from using credit cards, but because I use cash, I get reduced rates on many, many purchases; fuel, logging supplies, building...

I have an old hand dug well, and occasionally use it when the power goes out, but it really sucks to lift 5 gallon pails of water up and out of the hole. I have a hand, rotary transfer pump I bought, but never used, and thought about dropping that down into the well with a hose on it. But how...

When I crop rotate from corn to hayfields, I just use a plow and a log cut from the woods. By deep plow with a land plow, it loosens the soil. Then I take the biggest, longest log I can drag through the dirt, and then grade the area. The log pushes the rocks into the soft soil, but also...

I have a "catch basin" on my land, though I call it a "dry pond", or a "swale". Whatever you want to call it, it is the last point before it enters the woods. I do not have to clean it out very often, maybe 10-15 years, but it is a good place to catch my topsoil before it gets sent into the...

Have you ever thought about just building a wooden bridge? I built this 8 foot bridge (an 8 foot span, 12 feet wide) that is plenty strong enough for my tractor for $16.50. I could have used a culvert, but it would have been more expensive, and culverts are kind of ugly.

I have done this several times with just a tractor, but I have never gotten any videos of it. The only thing I might add is a plow, just because it really helps loosen the soil, and doubles as a counterweight, but it is not really needed if you do not have one, or can borrow one. For me, I...

No, I was clearing land on a mountainside, and went to back up and my left track went zinging back and piled up on my bulldozer blade. I was at the highest point on the mountain of course, and with a 700 John Deere, so it was no small feat to get that tractor fixed. hence the name: BrokenTrack...

I have been redoing an old house that I have, and redid the driveway with gravel and such. It was no big deal, but I wanted a way to get across the new ditch. I thought about a culvert, but they are ugly, and cost money, so I decided to go with a bridge instead. I admit that it took me 8 hours...

I have a choice, I can either run a flail with knives, or switch over to a head that has hammers. So far I have only ran the flail with the knives, and it is okay. It does really well on stemmy stuff like wild mustard, kudzu, bamboo, and hardwood saplings up to an inch in diameter, but can jam...

My wife and I decided to sell a couple of houses, so I was just finishing up getting them ready to sell when a friend stopped by and said he needed some help. He has had a terrible time getting workers this year for his Heavy Excavating business, and said he needed someone to mow the sides of...

It was kind of a sad day, Katie (my wife) and I unfortunately experienced a miscarriage last Thursday. We are saddened by the loss for sure. We love children, have four daughters of our own, (4,10,11 and 12), yet would have loved to had welcomed another into this world. Sadly, for whatever...

We know some people from church who lamented that they would "never be able to build their house", so Katie and I talked it over, and decided God has blessed us with enough wood and that we could give them some so they could have some lumber to build with. He came over the other day and set up...

Well after pending $10.50 and about 8 hours of my life in fabrication, I ended up finishing my stick rake enough to do a trial run. It works! After doing a little logging on me, the loggers trekked across one of my fields and left a mess in a corner with limbs everywhere, far too many to move...

We have, and while I am not sure I would call it "art", we do like to do photo shoots. We have done several, her as Little Red Ridinghood and me as the Logger that saves her. We also did some of us dressed up like the 1940's at a local railroad that is a throw back to that era. Our home is...

I am not sure if anyone has ever heard of this before, but it is a new things brides do. Rather than keep their wedding dresses to sit in a closet, get yellow and be moth eaten, the brides put their dress on one last time and...well...just plain ruin it. The whole time they take photos of the...

A year ago, I was in a major logging accident. I had just dropped a tree and was limbing it out when I woke up on the ground, my chainsaw nearby, my hardhat knocked off, and a pool of blood in the snow. I reached up to my face and the palm of my hand was covered with blood, and I was snorting it...

I took on an ambitious project this year; clearing 70 acres of forest and putting it into fields. Normally I do the logging myself, but property taxes and getting cancer has really caused me to contract that part out this winter, and I have been pretty happy with the result. They can do in 1...

I have been working this past week on a homemade feller-buncher head for my Wallenstein Log Trailer. I am not 100% there as I had some set-backs. Silly me I fully welded up some mounting brackets without cycling the feller-buncher head through to see if the geometry would work. I thought sure...

This is not the most involved build I ever did, but when a friend gave me a 20 KW, 83 amp PTO Generator, I needed to mount it to something. It did not need to be super portable, but movable if needed. My first thoughts were to mount it to an old woods trailer I had, but it would have taken an 8...

I was hoping to post this in the Lombard Log Hauler section, but there does not seem to be one like John Deere, New Holland, Kubota or Kioti. (LOL) A few years ago the family went to Maine Logging Days at Lenard Woods and there they rebuilt a Steam Lombard Log Hauler. Their philosophy is, it...

I got a skidder, but as my wife will attest, I only smile when I am on my bulldozer. One of the problems with my bulldozer is that it does not have a winch, and a factory one costs about $5,000 to install...used! Yet...when I am logging, I am often inefficient because with direct attached...

The older I get, the lazier I have become, and that applies to splitting wood. With a little thought I realized I could put my log trailer to use and build an upside down woodsplitter so that I could sit on my bottom and just run levers...and yes my new woodsplitter has a cup holder! The...

This past summer I needed to extend my logging road up over a fairly steep grade, and include rock check dams, crown, water bars, etc. A great importance however was getting a road that was flat along its length. I had a grader blade that could mount to the 3 point hitch, BUT the problem with...