[AT] Osage vs. Firestone

[Dean Vinson]

Thanks for all the great comments, gentlemen.   For now I took the no-action
alternative, other than having the local tire place repair the two slow
leaks.  I'm likely done operating the tractor in thorn country for the year,
so am probably okay until next year anyway.  I'll study up on the things
people have been mentioning--slime, foam, Kevlar liners, steel wheels (okay,
probably not the steel wheels... :)

The tires are 6-ply Firestone Champion Guide Grip, brand new, so I'm not
going to be in the market for entirely new tires for (hopefully) many years.
I did at least discover that they're tubeless instead of tubed as I'd
originally posted.  I had it in my head that they had innertubes, I guess
because the rears do and I had to have a new tube put in one over the summer
(big sharp rusty nail or some such thing had found it).   But big as life
they say "Tubeless" on the sidewall, now that I stopped to take a look at
them.  

Dean VP wrote:
> Is there no way to police around the trees manually somehow 
> prior to tractor traffic?  Or is there just too many?  

Yeah, too many, and the real problem is with the standing trees that I'm
mowing down with the rotary cutter.  Osage orange trees don't seem to have
thorns once they get big and old (unnecessary by then since the wood is
about as hard as iron, I guess), but the young ones are covered with the
@#*$! things and they're strong and wicked sharp.   I've cut down a lot of
the young trees and hauled them to a couple of big burn piles, but that's a
tedious and usually somewhat bloody task--they often grow in little clusters
with multiple trunks all close together and protected by those thorn-covered
branches, so there's no easy way to even get at them.  So for the smallest
ones, where each trunk in the cluster is maybe only an inch or so in
diameter, I run over them with the brushhog.  I steer the front wheels of
the tractor close to but not directly on top of them, but there's no way to
avoid hitting some.

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio