Busy week on the farm with cutting, welding, measuring, fabricating, plant prepping, and several other things on the agenda. 2014 planting season might begin in a few weeks depending on the weather, and then our focus will shift from many projects to a relatively singular task. Read on to see what we are working on until then.
Get a Grip
We bought an MDS grapple for our backhoe. The hoe has an extra heavy and wide bucket with a round back which meant we had a tough time finding any grapple that was made to fit this machine out of the box. There was one manufacturer we found, but the cost of the grapple was more than double anything else we saw. So as you can see above, we are making some modifications to our brand new piece of equipment. Basically we are cutting and flip-flopping the bottom of the grapple arms that attach to the bucket. This seems to be working out pretty well, and with our modifications the arms fit the bucket quite nicely! We’ll be bracing them up and building some mounting points onto the bucket next week.
Dad, Randy, and I test fitted the assembled grapple by hanging it from the forklift, but the weight of the whole thing kept us from lining the unit up very well so we could see what needed to be changed. So here we’ve just mocked up one of the arms without the rest of the grapple. This is what gave us the basis for the cuts made above. On the left side of the picture you can see how the arms came out of the box. By cutting, flipping, and re-welding the mounting point at the bottom of the arm now fits the curve of the bucket very closely.
Here we had the whole thing laid out on the floor. I think we should be able to get it all together and ready to go to work in a few more days if not less.
Got Air?
Work continued from last week into this week on our service trailer. Our cut up double door chest boxes are now reassembled as a four door cabinet with pass throughs front to back. A small air compressor we had fit snugly into one compartment after removal of the wheels. An old air hose and reel we’ve had sitting on a shelf for a few years turn out to be the perfect way to mount an air hose inside the box!
Dad cut a board to use as a mounting surface for the fuel hose reel that will end up in the other side of the cabinet on the service trailer. It appeared we will be able to keep both the reel and the pump inside the cabinet. The original plan kept the pump mounted on top of the fuel tank.
Green Machines
Equipment got shuffled about this week in preparation for planting time. The 4630 ventured out of the shop for the first time since it was mated to the 148 loader.
The 8420 tractor and planter teamed up for the first time since last summer. Sometimes tires don’t appear flat until you hook up 60′ worth of planter frame and row units! Zero PSI in this tire. I put it back up to 20. We didn’t hook on the new 8360R to the planter because we don’t need the additional horsepower for planting. It can be hooked on a implement to do some tillage, and after planting it will be the tractor on our fertilizer applicator where we will want that power. The 8420 can just stay hooked on the planter until July when we will likely double crop soybeans after wheat harvest.
Do all farms have an old M still working? Many of them do I’m sure. Many times it is handier for moving stuff around the shed than a tractor or truck would be. Both combine heads had to come out of the shed in order to get the planter off the back wall. The we backed them both in again and moved the combine into a corner where it will sit until early July for wheat harvest of a couple of days before napping again for a couple of months until fall harvest.
Family Affair
A long-standing tradition on our family farm has been to run this star up to the top of grain leg for Christmas. Last week brought some of the nicest weather we’ve seen since Thanksgiving so we took the opportunity to bring the star back down to earth.
And we ended the week with my son pulling my dad around the shop on the creeper.
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Brian,What do you plan to do with the grapple on the front of the JCB 214?
Moving brush into burn piles when we maintain fence rows.
How old is your Dad? 🙂
61 next month.
With the table saw so close to the wall, I suspect your dad couldn’t finish cutting the board in two. Did he have to move the saw to finish the cut?
He made it.
I like the old red M Farmall amongst all that “green”!