Hello Guest

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - vinsond

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 6
1
ATIS General Tractor Discussion / Re: Osage orange
« on: March 27, 2018, 08:19:12 PM »
I have a section you can clear for me when you are done (-:   

I've considered hiring out, but to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, "I'm expensive and slow."  Doesn't seem to be too effective as a marketing slogan.

Seriously though, that wagon was a cool find.  In a really interesting coincidence, a really neat old metal wheel (old dump rake wheel??) was found in mine.   Leaning up against a shed now for decoration[

Thanks!  I was really pleased with it.  That section of hedgerow is immediately next to what I suspect was a public road at some point in the distant past, pre-automobile, so I've enjoyed wondering whether the wagon had been parked there by some prior farmer of this land or abandoned after some serious breakdown or accident on the road.

p.s.   The osage battle continues... here's a photo from yesterday evening of two stump-removal fires shortly after I'd built them back up in their third day of existence.

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio

2
John Deere / Re: ATTN: John Deere Owners
« on: March 27, 2018, 08:04:11 PM »
I actually did have a John Deere concern for a while a few months ago.   The seat on my 620 suddenly seemed to tilt down toward the front of the tractor, so I was thinking the shock absorber must have gotten "sprung" or some such thing and would need to be replaced.  I ignored it for a while, intending to look into it once the weather got warmer.   But I eventually noticed (duh!) that the seat suspension arms had somehow popped free from the pins that support them on the front side of the battery box, and just needed to be set back in place.  Easy fix.  I'm not sure how they came off to begin with, but I suspect it happened when I was using the rear blade to level some ground where I'd recently burned out some big stumps... the blade caught a root and stopped forward motion of the tractor, causing (a) the front end to suddenly rise, (b) me to grab the clutch lever while cursing my stupidity, and (c) the front end to drop back down.   Must have been enough of a jolt to bounce the ends of those suspension arms off their posts.

Anyway, all's well that ends well, and the 620 is back to normal and I'm a bit wiser about use of that blade.

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio

3
ATIS General Tractor Discussion / Re: New to the forum
« on: March 23, 2018, 04:59:05 PM »
Great old photo!   And how cool to have the family connection.

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio

4
ATIS General Tractor Discussion / Osage orange
« on: March 23, 2018, 04:56:40 PM »
I have about 14 acres of old pasture that's pretty much completely overgrown with osage orange, which I assume spread from the two old deliberately-planted hedgerows (hence the other common name for osage, “hedge apple,”) along the old farm lanes.   I get the original purpose, but left untended for many decades the darn stuff sprawls and twists and leans and interlocks and spreads, making the land all but impenetrable.   For four years now I’ve been slowly battling it with a chainsaw and some prodigious bonfires.

The wood is amazingly hard and dense, making for magnificent fenceposts and extremely hot, long-lasting fires, and I’ve read it’s a great choice for archery bows.   But it darn sure makes you work for it.   The same features that make it such an effective hedge (long, jagged, twisted, interlocked branches, and strong, sharp thorns on the young shoots and suckers) make it darn hard to cut down; cutting through a big branch or the main trunk might be easy enough but getting the darn thing to fall to the ground is another matter.   Sometimes takes a tractor and chain to drag each cut section down and out of the surrounding hedge.    Clock goes by fast without much to show for it in situations like that.

Then there’s the question of what to do with the stumps, since the wood won’t hardly ever rot and becomes harder with time.   Wild cherry turns into marshmallow after a couple years laying on the ground and in the weather; osage turns into iron and just lays there, waiting for you to forget it, until the day comes when it snaps the shear pin in your rotary cutter like a piece of chalk.

For most of the big trees, my normal procedure is to cut the tree about 18” or 24” above the ground and let it fall (or drag it down with the tractor and chain, if necessary).  After cutting it all up into manageable size pieces, I pile some of the big stuff around the stump but save some for later.   The few medium-size branches that are straight and free of shoots and suckers and forks, I cut for firewood and haul into a shed; the twisty nasty crap goes straight onto the pile above the stump, along with all the small stuff, for (sooner or later) a nice bonfire.   Once all the small stuff has burned down I gradually throw on the rest of the big logs to keep the stump burning.   Usually takes a couple of days to really catch, but eventually the stump and big roots will burn down underground like a seam of coal, sometimes continuing to smoke and smolder for a week or more, finally leaving a little crater as the ash and dirt above it collapse down into the void.   

For the smaller trees, I scrape away enough dirt to give the chainsaw chain a little breathing room and then cut them dead level with the ground, saw them up into pieces, and chuck them onto the nearest burnpile.   But then I paint the cut stumps with Garlon 3A to keep them from turning into the nastiest thorniest hardiest bushes you can imagine.

This morning’s episode in the battle against the osage was fairly light, continuing a long process of cleanup along one of the original hedgerows.   Unlike with the big osage trees out in the middle of the old pasture, I’m trying to save some of the original hedgerow trees if they’re at least somewhat vertical, so I don’t cut and burn them in place--but the long low branches that sprawled 30 or 40 feet over into the neighboring field had go.   So I cut them up and loaded them into a wagon, and hauled them around to a burnpile away from the main hedgerow.   The Super M provided the motive power and looked good doing it.

When I first began clearing this particular area a few months ago, it was a thicket, impossible to see through from one side to the other, much less walk around in.   As I cut and piled and cut and piled, I eventually ran across the remains of a very old farm wagon.   Seems to have been there many decades, based on the size of some of the honeysuckle and other scrubby trees I cut out from all in and around it, but whether it’s been 50 years or 100 I don’t know.  I think I’ll just leave it where it sits, plant some native hardwoods in the area to give it some company.   Looked pretty neat this morning, rising out of the remains of last Wednesday’s snowfall.

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio

5
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: August 26, 2016, 10:50:48 AM »
Ralph, wonderful video as always.  The Merc looks great inside and out, and I bet it was fun to take it on a bit of a roadtrip.

Charlie, I'm sure your wife is much the better for being under your care as she recovers.  I hope things continue to go well and you have more time for other pursuits.

I haven't hardly posted anything here or on the main list in quite a while.  The Portland, Indiana engine and tractor show is under way right now, keeping Gene plenty busy no doubt, but I'm sorry to say I likely won't even make it over there for an afternoon.   Three different contractors coming to the house today... electrician, insulation company, and a door salesman.

Big project at home lately has been renovation of our "sunroom," originally a porch that was enclosed decades ago and has been modified at various points since then.   All I'd intended to do was build a little "hall tree," as my wife calls it, a place to sit and put on your boots or hang up some coats with some shelves above for hats and gloves.  Then we thought it'd be nice to add a light on top of it to illuminate the knicknacks and such that my wife plans to put up there.   While investigating how to run a wire up there, I discovered there wasn't a bit of insulation in the wall... so we figured we might as well fix that before we built anything new up against the wall.   Pulled off all the old paneling, all the old drywall, cleaned everything up, and then of course realized this would be the ideal time to add some new outlets, make the room lighting a little nicer, etc.   And shoot, that old entrance door is just drafty as can be, and with the wall stripped down I could see it wasn't even framed in very well... so this is the project that never ends.   Anyway, I just got the wiring all finished last night, and just in time because an insulation contractor is on his way to spray on new cellulose insulation.   The door salesman will take measurements for a new exterior door and then come back and install it in several weeks.    

All the rest of the house is solid brick, 13" thick, but the sunroom is just brick veneer over wood sheathing (actually 3/4" tongue-and-groove planks...pretty nice stuff!) over 2x4 wood studs.   But the stud spacing was crazy, nothing consistent at all.  I added a few new ones on 4' centers to make it easier to put the new drywall up, but that just made the overall spacing even crazier, so no way to use fiberglass batt insulation without having to custom-cut every single piece.   So I'm happy to contract out the spray-on cellulose.   Never seen it done so I'll be interested in the process.  I guess it takes a couple days to dry, so I'll plan to hang the new drywall next weekend.   After that I'll be looking around for a drywall finisher to do the mud and tape... that's another task I don't mind hiring out.

Here's a photo as it looks now, just before the insulation goes on.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]974[/ATTACH]

The electrician is coming to add a sub-panel next to the main breaker panel in the basement.   Main panel is fine but full, and although I'm happy to run new circuits I don't feel up to adding a subpanel myself.  While he's here he's also going to wire in a new quick-disconnect cable for my old Winco 20KW PTO-powered generator... some prior owner had put a nice transfer switch out by the electric meter and that generator came with my JD 620 when I bought it from a neighbor a couple years ago, but I didn't have the nerve to try to wire it in myself.

Then this afternoon Lowe's will deliver the drywall along with a bunch of other 4x8 stuff I need for other projects:  pegboard for a new workbench in the shop and another one in the basement, MDF for benchtop worksurfaces and shelves, plywood for a future little roof extension over the entrance door to the sunroom ("project that never ends"...)

Hope this finds you gentlemen well.

Dean
Saint Paris, Ohio

6
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: March 11, 2016, 11:02:37 AM »
Thanks, Ralph.  Back in the late 70s I worked for a farmer who had a then-new Ford 4600 and I always thought it was a really good tractor, and then a couple of years ago I looked briefly at a 3600 when I was first settling into the farm here.  Didn't buy that one but didn't forget it either, and have been casually paying attention to ads for them ever since.  Saw this one and just decided the time was right.

It's in the 50s F here today and the rain from the past few days has stopped.  I'm going to work on some erosion control on my dinky little stream through the pasture, where it passes under my fence by the road.  Had 20 tons of riprap delivered yesterday and can load it into my little trailer with the Kubota, but unloading and placing it looks like it'll be entirely a manual process.  We'll see how much I get done.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]964[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]965[/ATTACH]

[Update as of about 6 pm... moved maybe a fourth of that pile, maybe less.  Figure I'll sleep pretty well tonight.]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]966[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]967[/ATTACH]

Dean
Saint Paris, Ohio

7
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: March 06, 2016, 07:41:44 PM »
Gene, glad to hear you got the truck problem solved!  You know your way around diesels mighty well, I'd say--I'd need a week-long Modern Diesels 101 course to even begin to know where to look.

We had similar blanket of wet snow Friday morning, not quite as much as you had.  Pretty much all gone now, maybe a few little patches left here or there where it had drifted up.  I always like to see all the seasons come, but it doesn't take much of a winter (and this one wasn't much of a winter) to make me think "Okay, it'll be nice when spring comes."

I tinkered with the 3600 for a while this evening after spending most of the day on projects in the house.  Changed the antifreeze mostly on general principle since I didn't like the look of the stuff that was in it although it tested fine.  Right brake doesn't seem very strong so I played with the adjustment a little with the tractor sitting in the barn, but by then it was getting close to dinner time so I didn't take it back out to see if there's any improvement; probably be next weekend before I have time.   At this point I'm mostly just enjoying the process of getting familiar with it.

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio

8
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: February 27, 2016, 05:41:45 PM »
Ralph, what powers that Wisconsin saw?   I have some old photos of my dad using a buzz saw mounted to his dad's Farmall F-20.  Yours has its own platform with a belt pulley on the other end of the saw shaft, I'm guessing?  Or does the Wisconsin name mean it has its own little Wisconsin engine?

Charlie, wow, 18 inches of snow in a day would pretty much dominate your activities for a while.   I'm enough west of you to have missed all the heavy stuff, and even this past week I missed the 3" of snow that Gene got; only a little ways south of him but it was evidently enough to make the difference.  After the previous two winters I guess I'm happy to see how mild this one has been, but it'd be okay with me if we had at least one really nice snow day.

Gene very kindly arranged for one of his neighbors to haul my new tractor home to me today, and I tried it out for a while with the little trailer to haul some brush to a burnpile.  Very nice little tractor and will probably spend most of its time hooked to the brushhog.  

[ATTACH=CONFIG]961[/ATTACH]

Thanks very much, Gene, setting up the tractor-hauling for me sure made my weekend easy!

Dean
Saint Paris, Ohio

9
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: December 25, 2015, 01:44:45 PM »
Thanks, Ralph--that photo of mine with the snow is from last winter, though, just seemed like a good one to post today.  Current weather here is way warm for the season, continuing the pattern we've had most of December.  No freezing temps in the forecast until New Year's Day, and even then it looks dry so who knows when we'll see much snow.  I'm always glad to see winter (for a while), but my wife's family is on their way up for the afternoon so it's sure convenient to not have to deal with ice and snow on the roads right now.

Dean
Saint Paris, Ohio

10
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: December 25, 2015, 08:07:29 AM »
Charlie, just kidding about the cats, although I do need to get the population under control.  Still haven't managed to hold onto the mother cat long enough to get her into a carrier and off to the vet to be spayed, and one of her five kittens from last summer thus far remains un-caught and un-spayed, plus there's one other semi-wild barn cat that showed up a while ago.  Just yesterday my wife found a cute little calico kitten lost back in the woods, friendly as can be but hungry and eager to be rescued, which raises the cat population to an even dozen.  We named her Twelve.  :)

[ATTACH=CONFIG]950[/ATTACH]

Ralph, very interesting video, as always.  (Although those scenes of crossing over the running belt gave me the willies...)   The 50 sounds great.  Is that a Buda engine, like in the 40?

Gene, that's some beautiful oak...wish my woods had a lot more good trees instead of all the osage orange.  That stuff is good firewood but troublesome in about all respects and doesn't make for a pretty or healthy woods.  I wish I could be taking advantage of this warm weather to be out clearing some more of it, but my chainsaw is at the repair shop... last weekend I beat it up by forgetting that I had it in the bucket of the Kubota when I started to use the bucket to shove the ends in on a big bonfire.  Only took me a minute to remember, but it was already banged up and a little scorched by then.  Fortunately didn't suffer any permanent damage, I don't think.

Happy Christmas to you gentlemen,

Dean

[ATTACH=CONFIG]951[/ATTACH]

11
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: December 09, 2015, 07:26:03 PM »
Charlie, I likewise have seen some round-baled cornstalks this fall, and don't recall seeing them before either.  I was wondering if they'd be used for bedding in some winter pasture or pen or something, but there sure are a bunch of them.

Okay, Google just pointed me to this site:  http://ocj.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/DLivestock275.pdf.

Dean
Saint Paris, Ohio

12
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: November 23, 2015, 10:27:46 PM »
Ralph, good video as always.  You've got some big sky, as the saying goes.  And always interesting to me to see swathed crops...have never seen it done around here (1700 miles southeast of you).

Gene, ditto on the nice shop floor!  And on spending a lot of time finishing projects.  But sure is nice to have a good facility, and to have it done right.

Charlie, let me know when you'd like me to drop off a couple of cats.  :)

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio

13
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: October 20, 2015, 10:23:51 PM »
Charlie, roger that.  I've got five new arrivals myself.  The mother is a mostly-wild barn cat that escaped my grasp last time I tried to catch her to take her to the vet to get spayed.  Got another appointment in a week or so and will try again.   Her kittens look about the same size as those in your photo, and by now I can't catch them either.

14
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: October 14, 2015, 10:15:14 PM »
Gene, just got done posting and saw you'd also posted tonight.  Hope all goes smoothly with your procedure tomorrow.  And I bet your shop is shaping up to be first-rate.   Cleaning up, reconfiguring, and properly equipping my shop is on my list as well...seems to be a long list, though.

Dean

15
'round the pot-bellied stove / Western Ohio Update
« on: October 14, 2015, 10:04:54 PM »
Tonight after work I only had a little bit of daylight left, not enough time to work on that little roof project, but I used the Super M and my little utility trailer to haul the trash can out to the street for tomorrow morning's pickup.  Not much of a workout for the tractor but it was a heck of a nice evening (good weather, as I'd mentioned above), so I unhooked the trailer, grabbed the camera, and posed the Super M for a few photos just as the sun was setting.  

[ATTACH=CONFIG]924[/ATTACH]  [ATTACH=CONFIG]925[/ATTACH]  [ATTACH=CONFIG]926[/ATTACH]

Dean
Saint Paris, Ohio

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 6