Rain Check

This will be my last visit for the year, the remainder of my schedule doesn't allow me to get back until after the first of the year. Not much can be done this day as it has been raining quite a bit the previous days. Today's trip is to study the land and the water flow. After a few months of clearing up the brush and debris left from the loggers, I wanted to see how all the cleanup has helped the draining if at all.

As I had expected the field is covered with water and the expected dry spots are still dry. I am still convinced I need a pond and a ditch to channel the overflow back to the street. This would require trenching about 450 feet from the pond to the county road.

I don't see work getting started until the first of the year, again another disappointing year of progress.

More Brush Pile Burning

Another burn day, the hope was to get two more brush piles burned up to help the dozer folks to finalize the grading and start the digging of the pond. The day started out fine enough, I got the pile burning, plenty of dirt around the burn to prevent fire spreading and burning started at 11:00 am.

The first pile I started was the biggest, it was also kind of loosely piled, so I spent some time clearing area and trying to keep the fire fed.

So I'm new to this pile burning stuff, but come 2:00 pm (3 hours) the pile had hardly been burned down, so I started trying to push the pile onto itself to get more material burning. Around 3:00pm, the fire was well on its way to burning. I also discovered that the tractor burns more gasoline than I figured, after running out of gas while it's sitting in the burn pile and having to add gas to the tractor in the burn pile. I decided I need more gas, lots more gas. Unfortunately I only had a five gallon gas can, so I made one trip to the gas station to fill up the can, filled up the tractor then made another trip to fill the gas can again and fill another 5 gallons in the tractor. Once last trip to fill the gas can so I have a reserve in case it runs out of gas in the burn pile again.

After all this back and forth to the gas station it was not 4:30 pm and I'm needing to start thinking about winding this thing down before I lose light and also need to get home, however the burn pile is still burning strong. I spent the next 2 1/2 hours trying to kill the fire and around 7:15 finally get the fire put out and smoldering enough so I can leave it for tomorrow.

So one thing I take away from this, is work the fire and work it early, keep the fire fed early so it burns majority of material and you're left with just small stuff that's easy enough to extinguish if only one day to work burn file. The other thing I learned is that if you're gonna burn, be prepared to stay the night if necessary when burning.

Fit for Work

Day two of getting the tractor ready for work. Simple fluid changing is taking longer than expected, yesterday it took all day to change oil and filter,  today took all day to change transmission, hydraulic and rear end fluids. Its also not cheap, $120 in fluids today and $40 yesterday. I still have a few things to do, lube all grease fittings, tighten fan belt, change spark plugs, change broken temperature gauge, and I'm sure more will come up.

I still need to figure out how to change hydraulic fluid for the front loader.

Now I just need time to use the tractor and get some brush piles burned so land clearing can continue.

Getting Tractor Ready for Work

Today has been anticipated since we had the tractor delivered. Since the tractor got delivered late last Friday, I didn't have time to really check it out. I was able to take the day and get familiar with the tractor from a mechanical standpoint

I found the serial number and model number. With this information I now know its a 1956 Ford 850 tractor. I had planned to change all the fluids and spark plugs today.  Before I could begin I had to pick up parts, the Tractor Supply Sotore in Porter had the gear oil I needed and the Napa store in Cleveland had the oil filter and plugs. Unfortunately the plugs wouldn't arrive until after noon.

I crawled around the tractor, located all drsin plugs, fill points and inspection points. I made sure I had sll the tools needed before starting. First job up would be oil change and filter replacement. This took longer than ecpected but after draining and closing things up it was alredy noon and time to go pick up plugs and hsve some lunch.

I get back from lunch add the new oil and also check the air intake, the air filter requires oil so figure I'd fill it up. After inspection I notice the sir intake pipe is clogged with dirt, so I remove it and clesr it and reinstall.

By now its 3:30 and I don't think I will have time to change the transmissiin, hydraulic and rear end fluids, so I pack up and call it a day. I was sure hoping to get more done thsn I did, but there's always tomorrow.

Tractor Delivery

Awesome day today, the tractor arrived! The weather wasn't too cooperative, Dan Moore (previous tractor owner) wasn't able to load up the tractor as soon as he had hoped due to the torrential down pouring of rain in the morning. Eventually the tractor made the trip from Hockley to the Fifty Acre Wood. It arrived at 4:00 pm which meant most of the tractor playing day was over. After a steep learning curve on operating this 1950ish beauty, I was able to clear out a home for it, pull the key and bid it a farewell until the next play date.

So funny story about this delivery, Dan cranks it up, unloads it off the trailer then turns it off. He installs the PTO then goes over some of the controls with me. He then packs up and leaves. I hop on the tractor and turn the key and it cranks right up, runs for about 5 seconds then dies. I try again but it won't turn over. I keep trying but no luck. At this point I'm starting to feel befuddled. Call Dan up and ask him what the deal is, he says it may need gas. Sure enough I look in the tank and it is totally empty. I hop in the truck get some gas return and fill it up and the cranks up without a problem and just growls like a tractor ready to work. It had not occurred to me that he would deliver it without a drop of fuel, but that's my "duh" moment, and I'm sure there will be more as I learn more about this tractor.

Tractor Purchase

Work on the Fifty Acre Wood is going slow, the land clearing process is creeping along at a snails pace. After weeks of searching we found a fellow with a heavy duty forestry mulcher who was willing to come out and make mulch out of the 29 brush piles we have around the perimeter of the property left by the previous dozer contractor. He was going to charge somewhere in the neighborhood of $5000 to get the work done, but would not be able to start for a month.

After some consideration of timing and tired of outsourcing to people who have different schedules than myself. We decided to look into buying a tractor that would give us more horse power around the homestead and help push some of the brush piles around so we could burn them and just provide help with general cleanup and mowing.

Today we made that purchase! A 1954 Ford 800 Tractor, 45 HP with a front loader and rotary cutter (brush hog), all for $6600. I'm not sure if that's a good deal or not, with 1300 hours on the rebuilt motor, we're hoping to get a few trouble free years out of it before having to upgrade. Instead of spending the 5k on outsourcing work, we spent 6k on a machine that will help us with other work needed on the homestead.

Here's a picture of the beauty, we take delivery this Friday (09.11.15) and I can't wait to take her for a spend around her new home.

Planned Burn Day

So today is exciting and scary. Need to start burning some of the brush piles so pond digging and grading can begin. I arrive at the Fifty Acre Wood by 10:00am to start the burning, Gerald will showed up later in the day to start work and manage the piles so I could leave. I started four brush piles burning.

This was the largest of the brush piles I had to burn

The second one seemed harmless but lots of grass nearby

The third one as spread out and not as compact as others

The fourth one was the smallest to burn

This was about 2:00pm, all piles were smoldering and reduced

Dozer Moves In

Today is an exciting day, after months of rain and trying to get a dirt work contractor to come out, we are finally seeing signs of this happening. Today the dozer showed up and was unloaded, Gerald Crawford, started doing some earth moving. It was a glorious sight, as he started crawling the D-12 down to the "dig" site, all I could do is watch. As he's pushing debris left from the previous dozer contractor over a year ago, I just watched as the D-12 made easy work of what would have taken me days by hand.