Used equipment - tractor

I've found that there are two ways to buy equipment. One is to buy new, and the other is to buy used. Used seems like you'll be saving some money -- the initial cost is less, and you can often buy a better quality or larger than you would otherwise be able to afford.

So this is my used tractor. It's a circa-1993 Kubota 9580. At 100 hp it's got a lot out power, and with 4wd and a shuttle transmission, it's pretty handy around the farm. I paid $16,000 for it, and so far I've spent around $1,000 maintaining it. That's the drawback to used equipment -- you have to fix it.

The other issue with used equipment is that you often don't know the maintenance that was done. So I look at what I'm going to buy carefully, but you're really limited in what you can know. So my routine for buying equipment is to do all of the maintenance that might reasonably be due.

Oil & filter change, hydraulic fluid & filter change, fuel filter change, greasing all fittings (that was a fun 4 hours, let me tell you!), checking the toe-in of the front tires, and so on. With this tractor I also had to mount the drivers side door and rear glass window on the cab; I got the glass as part of the deal, but had to buy the various hinges and so on from kubota (for !!!$500!!! -- are they gold plated? yeesh!) and mount the glass.

This is the reason for todays maintenance break; a 12" gash in the front tire. So the tire itself is $620, and you have to wait a week or so for it to get here. So while the tractor is idle, might as well do a maintenance day on it. Fix the light on the dash that burned out. Check and diagnose why the air conditioner doesn't work (you have to remove half the tractor to replace the fan belt that is missing for the air conditioner-- joy!) and get the various lights working. While you're at it, might as well blow the radiator clean, change the air filter, replace the other belts in the engine compartment that look fine, but hey, you're there anyways, right? and finally replace the hour meter so that you can be more precise in your future maintenance. The hour meter costs $320, by the way.

My experience has been like this for most of the used equipment that I've bought. You either pay the price for a new, or you end up paying a very similar amount in maintenance. The advantage with new is that you know when the payment is due. With a used tractor it pretty much decides when a payment is due.

So this months tractor payment:

Front tire: $620 + $22 mounting fee

New hour meter: $320

Bulbs and lenses for lights: $15

New fan belts: $55

New antifreeze, oil, hydraulic: $120

Air conditioner charging: $65

Plus 2 days of labor to take it all apart, and put it all back together.

Using the harley rake to lay out driveway gravel

yes, its not an animal post, but I've been getting questions about my harley rake, so i took pictures of my brothers driveway that we're using it on.

The project summary is to make a circular driveway in front of my brothers garage. So the tractor bucket got used to pull up the existing slab and break it up. (get bucket under the edge of the slab, lift, hit the slab with a sledge hammer, slab breaks, repeat)

Then we dug out some dirt and tossed the riprap into the hole, and then dumped some 2-4" quarry spalls and did a rough grade with the bucket.

You can see a pile of 2x4 quarry spalls to the left. On the right is a pass from the harley rake, and then another pass. Quarry spalls are big rocks; they are hard to spread with something like a box blade, but the harley does a pretty good job of it. The thing that the harley does not do is compact the rocks after the pass. The surface is pretty level, but if you were to drive a car over it you'd get pockets because of the rocks shifting to "lock" themselves in. The goal at this stage is to get a rough level 4" or so below the level of the blacktop. So we're not using the grading wheels on the back of the harley rake, we're using the roller. You do that by tightening the toplink on the implement.

These two pictures show a pretty typical run with the rake. I'm dragging a half yard of the 2-4" quarry spalls behind me at this point but leaving a 7' wide smooth bed of them. Look at the position of the dirt pile in the background and you can get an idea. These shots taken while the tractor is moving forward at 1mph

Could I get results like this from a box blade? I couldn't. The quarry spalls tend to get under the blade and lift the box blade up; it requires constant up-and-down for a box blade to leave a rough level. The harley does it in one pass, but this isn't really where the harley shines.

Here's a look at the bed after this pass. Notice that there's a 'curb' on the right side of the picture where the edge of the rake was. I was cutting down to the level we wanted the finished grade to be. You can spread, take up, or drop gravel with this tool.

Here's a truckload of 3/4" clear gravel that will be the finished surface. The bucket drops small piles over the work area and the harley rake will spread it.

Here's the finished gravel spread over the area at a uniform depth of about 4". There were a few quarry spalls that stuck up through the gravel. I used the harley rake to rake the big rocks out of the small gravel and drop them in a low spot nearby. That sort of sorting on the ground is where this tool really shines.

This is the finished grade. 4-6" of quarry spalls on clay with 4" of clear on top of it. Eventually he'll want to pour concrete over the clear, but he wanted to drive around on it and compact it for a few months. so we left it in a pretty good place. No more dirt into the garage.

Pig carrier

When I'm moving a bunch of pigs, this is what I use. The trailer in this picture attached to my truck is a modified 2 axle car trailer. My brother brian fabricated the sides that fit into the stake pockets built into the original trailer. A piece of plywood across the front, and the gates hold the sides apart. At the other end is my tractor with the pig hauler attached to it. The tractor has an attachment on the back that's called a 3 point hitch -- because it connects via three points.





This carrier is designed to be able to handle 2 full sized sows and a human at the same time. that's about 800lbs of live animal. The carrier itself weighs about 700lbs. The tractor weighs 11,000lbs. It's 6' square.
It easily holds a dozen piglets, who spend a lot of their time looking down through the mesh that they're standing on. They're pretty amazed that they haven't fallen through.

To load a herd of swine, I back the pig holder up to the trailer, open the small gate on it, and then open the trailer gate. I walk to the front of the trailer, and the pigs basically run out of the trailer into the pig carrier. Shut the gate behind them, and you're good to go. This time of year we have deep mud. This group of berkshire piglets is going out to the pinball pen to be conditioned for eventual pasturing.

The piglets are all loaded; off to the pinball pen.