glennmac
Veteran Member
Havent been around much because I have been shopping for computers, bidding on computers, learning a lot about online auction fraud ... and, oh yeah, spending many hours, yet again, extricating my tractor from the part of my propery known as the Oozama Ver Boten.
The short explanation is that I have finally figured out the best way to unstick my tractor: jack up each end of tractor, and slide a traction board under the lifted wheels. I now need some thoughts on what kind of jack to buy and how I can get or make boards, or some other surface, with a superior traction texture on it.
The longer explanation. It has been a dry year, so I had succeeded last month in brush cutting all the phragmites and cattails that grow in the Oozama. I sneaked in backwards with the cutter and only got stuck twice. The evil vegetation began to spring up again, of course, but October was very dry, encouraging my inveterate foolishness.
Being lazy, I decided to go into the low growth Oozma zone with my 72" mmm on the tractor, instead of swapping on the rear cutter. Oh, it was doing a beautiful job, cutting a smooth green carpet. Then it happened. The gauge wheels of the mmm dug into the muck in a low patch, the useless and horrid R4's did their instant mud slick thing, the wheels began digging holes, and I quickly ended up essentially floating on the mmm deck. Not only were the gauge wheels in the muck, but it was all up underneath the deck.
We tried many ways to move the tractor including pulling it with the Honda CRV, which just dug its own trenches. Because of the buried mmm housing, that tractor wasnt going to move forward or backwards under any circumstance I had available.
So, let's try to remove the mower and drive over it. Can't. The spring pins wont pull out of the link arms. Too much shear force on the link pins due to the pressure of the tractor on the buried deck, plus I cant reach under the deck to undo the pto shaft.
So we are forced to use a rare, mystical maneuver: the lateral ROPS pull. We tie ropes and chains from the Honda to the top of the ROPS and pull the tractor sideways, tipping it slightly. Eureka. Ths relieves the pressure on the deck and I get the link pins out on one side. Ditto on the other.
Now we want to use the car to pull the deck sideways out from under the tractor. But it wont fit. There are too many vertical projections on top of the deck that will hit the underside of the lowered, buried tractor. I remove the gauge wheel assembly on the far side of the deck. I remove some of the other arms and links. This is difficult and curseworthy, because I broke the only hammer I ever owned when I built my bridge in August, lost the only pliers I ever owned, and I had to use rocks and sticks to hammer out tight pins from the torqued tractor undercarriage. (The US should carpet bomb whatever country makes cotter pins--awful, detestable devices.)
Still, there is not enough room to fit the deck under the tractor. We finally get the brilliant idea to jack up the front of the tractor. Personally, I havent seen a jack since the '70's but my son says we have a one in the Mustang. He comes back with this little screw thing. We put it on a board on top of the ooze, and after fumbling with several inconvenient jack locations, this water-torture device succeeds in raising the front of the tractor several inches. I can remove the pto shaft that is jammed with mud and vegetation. We then succeed in pulling the deck sideways out from under the tractor. Victory! -- with half the tractor, disassembled with Stone Age tools, spread all over the ground .
Essentially, this procedure, in the end, worked. So I now want to buy a real jack and some sort of traction boards for the inevitable future burials.
1. Jack. It has to be light enough for me to carry it 500 yards from the garage to the Oozama. It has to be able to go very high. You really need to place the top of the jack much higher up on the tractor than you would on the underside of a car; you have to be able to raise the end of the tractor at least 18"; and you have to allow another 6" for submersion of the support board into the muck. Also, it has to be stable at weird angles, because sometimes the tractor is tilted when one side buries deeper than another. Any thoughts on a type or brand of jack?
2. The under-wheel traction surface. The problem with boards is that they are too slick when they get mud on them. They are also heavy to carry (for me) and a little too narrow. I am envisioning some sort of lightweight surface, about 15" wide, and with some sort of rough, grabbing surface texture. Plastic? Aluminum? Plywood? Is there something that I can apply to make the surface grabby and nubby, or is there some ready-made product already known to the off-roading, 4-wheeling crowd?
By the way, this entire problem was caused and complicated by the mmm. It would not have happened with a rear mount mower. The mmm reduces the flotation of the tires because it adds more weight to the tractor than a rmm. In addition, the rmm is easily detachable from the tractor. So we can add this to the advantages of a rmm over a mmm: less likely to cause you to get buried, and easier to get out, when you foolishly try to mow a swamp.
The short explanation is that I have finally figured out the best way to unstick my tractor: jack up each end of tractor, and slide a traction board under the lifted wheels. I now need some thoughts on what kind of jack to buy and how I can get or make boards, or some other surface, with a superior traction texture on it.
The longer explanation. It has been a dry year, so I had succeeded last month in brush cutting all the phragmites and cattails that grow in the Oozama. I sneaked in backwards with the cutter and only got stuck twice. The evil vegetation began to spring up again, of course, but October was very dry, encouraging my inveterate foolishness.
Being lazy, I decided to go into the low growth Oozma zone with my 72" mmm on the tractor, instead of swapping on the rear cutter. Oh, it was doing a beautiful job, cutting a smooth green carpet. Then it happened. The gauge wheels of the mmm dug into the muck in a low patch, the useless and horrid R4's did their instant mud slick thing, the wheels began digging holes, and I quickly ended up essentially floating on the mmm deck. Not only were the gauge wheels in the muck, but it was all up underneath the deck.
We tried many ways to move the tractor including pulling it with the Honda CRV, which just dug its own trenches. Because of the buried mmm housing, that tractor wasnt going to move forward or backwards under any circumstance I had available.
So, let's try to remove the mower and drive over it. Can't. The spring pins wont pull out of the link arms. Too much shear force on the link pins due to the pressure of the tractor on the buried deck, plus I cant reach under the deck to undo the pto shaft.
So we are forced to use a rare, mystical maneuver: the lateral ROPS pull. We tie ropes and chains from the Honda to the top of the ROPS and pull the tractor sideways, tipping it slightly. Eureka. Ths relieves the pressure on the deck and I get the link pins out on one side. Ditto on the other.
Now we want to use the car to pull the deck sideways out from under the tractor. But it wont fit. There are too many vertical projections on top of the deck that will hit the underside of the lowered, buried tractor. I remove the gauge wheel assembly on the far side of the deck. I remove some of the other arms and links. This is difficult and curseworthy, because I broke the only hammer I ever owned when I built my bridge in August, lost the only pliers I ever owned, and I had to use rocks and sticks to hammer out tight pins from the torqued tractor undercarriage. (The US should carpet bomb whatever country makes cotter pins--awful, detestable devices.)
Still, there is not enough room to fit the deck under the tractor. We finally get the brilliant idea to jack up the front of the tractor. Personally, I havent seen a jack since the '70's but my son says we have a one in the Mustang. He comes back with this little screw thing. We put it on a board on top of the ooze, and after fumbling with several inconvenient jack locations, this water-torture device succeeds in raising the front of the tractor several inches. I can remove the pto shaft that is jammed with mud and vegetation. We then succeed in pulling the deck sideways out from under the tractor. Victory! -- with half the tractor, disassembled with Stone Age tools, spread all over the ground .
Essentially, this procedure, in the end, worked. So I now want to buy a real jack and some sort of traction boards for the inevitable future burials.
1. Jack. It has to be light enough for me to carry it 500 yards from the garage to the Oozama. It has to be able to go very high. You really need to place the top of the jack much higher up on the tractor than you would on the underside of a car; you have to be able to raise the end of the tractor at least 18"; and you have to allow another 6" for submersion of the support board into the muck. Also, it has to be stable at weird angles, because sometimes the tractor is tilted when one side buries deeper than another. Any thoughts on a type or brand of jack?
2. The under-wheel traction surface. The problem with boards is that they are too slick when they get mud on them. They are also heavy to carry (for me) and a little too narrow. I am envisioning some sort of lightweight surface, about 15" wide, and with some sort of rough, grabbing surface texture. Plastic? Aluminum? Plywood? Is there something that I can apply to make the surface grabby and nubby, or is there some ready-made product already known to the off-roading, 4-wheeling crowd?
By the way, this entire problem was caused and complicated by the mmm. It would not have happened with a rear mount mower. The mmm reduces the flotation of the tires because it adds more weight to the tractor than a rmm. In addition, the rmm is easily detachable from the tractor. So we can add this to the advantages of a rmm over a mmm: less likely to cause you to get buried, and easier to get out, when you foolishly try to mow a swamp.
