[AT] Fun with the manure spreader

[Dean VP]

Dean,  That had to be really hard to accept. 😊  Reminds me of when I had my wife pull my hand start JD H with another JD H because I couldn't get the damn thing started. Down the driveway on to the asphalt road. Not a pop. She stopped and asked me if I had gas in the tank. Next subject! Yes, but not in the tank that I had connected to the carburetor. Duh!!!

Dean, a hint that I too had to learn the hard way. Sometimes we think we are still using newer tractors and implements and push them to their design limits.  But on the older/used implements it is sometimes very wise to not quite fill the manure spreader completely full. 😊   Learned the hard way. It pays to be a little conservative. 

Dean VP
Snohomish, WA 98290

-----Original Message-----
From: at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com [mailto:at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com] On Behalf Of Dean Vinson
Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2017 6:46 PM
To: 'Antique tractor email discussion group' <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Subject: Re: [AT] Fun with the manure spreader

> Winter hogs in the barn and manure spreader made for some long 
> Saturdays

Paul, that takes me back about 40 years.   While in high school I worked for
a dairy farmer, who'd had a pretty nice dairy barn:  Maybe 40 milking stanchions in two facing rows with a center aisle for the silo unloader and grain cart, and a manure trough/chain around the outside that then ran up a ramp outside the barn and over the spot where we'd park the spreader.  But he'd grown tired of the relentless dairy schedule and eventually sold his
cows, tore out the milking equipment, and converted to hogs.   Compared to
relatively minor manure cleanup around the trough, which had been the routine with the cows, I had to clean the entire area with a scraper and manually shove all the manure out to the edges and into the trough.
Besides all the additional effort it was just a very different consistency
and of course almost all manure and no straw.   Didn't work nearly as well
with the manure chain.

And then of course came winter, as you mentioned.  The manure chain was driven by an electric motor turning a big sprocket at the very end of the unloading ramp outside the barn, and every now and then the chain would come
off the sprocket and the whole thing would stop.   Climbing up that hog-crap
covered ramp with some wrenches and a pry bar or whatever, in the frigid January wind, and hanging out over the edge of the ramp to wrestle that chain back onto the sprocket, makes for kind of an entertaining memory now but was much less fun at the time.

> I didn't mind forking manure too bad growing up but I did hate walking 25'
with each fork-full to get to the spreader...

Farmer, I didn't have that particular experience but we did do all
barn-cleaning and spreading by hand:   Kids and pitchforks in the barn
pitching onto the old single-axle wagon, then out in the field pitching it
back off the wagon.   Seems like we got pretty good at pitching the stuff
quite some distance while spreading, to minimize the walking but also to avoid having to stop so often (and slow down the ordeal) to move the tractor and wagon.

> I hope you had a front end loader to load the spreader with. That is a 
> lot of hand labor to load with a manure fork!!

Cecil, yep, I was living large...loaded it all with my trusty little Kubota
BX2370, and then fired up the Super M to go spread it.   Didn't so much as
touch a pitchfork.  :)

I did have one related (mis)adventure, though.   That Kubota is a workhorse
but still just a little machine, and for almost four years now I've used the living daylights out of it.  All the finish mowing but also light-duty brushhogging when it seems more convenient than going to get one of the real
tractors and the brushhog, and lots and lots of loader work:   80 tons of
riprap, huge quantities of dirt and mulch, countless loads of firewood, shoving in the ends on dozens of giant burnpiles, all the zillion chores that you can find for a front loader even if you only have a little one.
At the start of this year I realized it'd go over 400 hours and therefore need some shop servicing to tend to the heavy stuff listed in the maintenance schedule, but I'd hoped it would wait until after some frosts so I wouldn't have to worry about mowing grass while it was in the shop.  No such luck, 400 hours came and went sometime over the summer, and I just kept
running it.   Kept the usual eye on fluid levels and such but had some worry
that I was pushing my luck, especially with the heavy use.    So then of
course I bought the manure spreader and started into that giant pile of manure, loading that spreader up over and over.

One day I went out to make some more progress on the manure pile, started up the Kubota and went to back out of the shed, lifting the mower deck as I went, and all of a sudden it just stopped dead in its tracks, wouldn't move
forward or backward.   Engine sounded fine, loader worked fine, but the
pedals felt mushy and weird and the tractor wouldn't move at all.   So I
consulted Google, which led me to assorted webpages explaining the limitations of these relatively light-duty machines and the risks of
overheating the transmission fluid, etc.   Dadgummit, they got my number.
So I called the local farm equipment dealership where I'd bought the thing from to begin with, and they came out and winched it up onto a truck and hauled it off to the shop.

A few days later I talked to the service manager, dreading the bad news and
the size of the repair bill, and he explained the problem:   Evidently while
raising the mower deck I'd bumped the hi-lo range lever into neutral, and turns out it works way better if you put it in a range that involves motion.

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio



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