Parts Tractor

Have you heard of a parts car?  That is when someone buys a not very good car with some good parts to use to fix up their pretty good car.  Well, Lee just bought a parts tractor.

We bought a tractor when we first moved here.  It was necessary to help clear the land for use, move boulders, sand, gravel and other tractory things.  We have lots of steep hills, so we needed one with a pretty big engine and 4 wheel drive.  We knew nothing about tractors, except the pretty green ones (John Deere) are very expensive.  We found a guy about 1 1/2 hours away that had a wide variety of used tractors and bought one from him. 

This was a Daedong tractor from Korea.  They don't make them anymore, but he assured us he could get parts, usually from Kioti, which makes a similar tractor.  That worked okay for a few years, even with getting parts from as far away as Korea and New Zealand.

Then it quit working and a part we needed was unavailable.  Now, we use the tractor many times during the year, but not enough to justify buying a super pricey one.  Probably.  Then Lee found a guy that had an old Daedong tractor, just like ours, that he had been using for parts to fix his Daedong tractor.  Then he sold the good one and had the leftover tractor sitting in his field.  So Lee bought it.



Notice on the fender that this is the DELUXE version of this tractor.  Pretty impressive, right!

 
Is this a smart purchase?  Who knows.  At the present, Lee is taking all the parts off and storing them.  The farmer he bought it from had to lift the tractor onto Lee's trailer with a fork lift, because he had taken the wheels off to use them elsewhere. We don't have a fork lift.  So we can't use the trailer or put it back into the barn until we get the tractor off.  His plan it to remove all the parts and label them.  Then we will use our engine hoist or the front loader on the currently working tractor to take the last heavy bits and put them somewhere.  Somewhere.

You can see the tractor we use off to the right in the background.  Maybe he should just fix it up and get a John Deere!  But where is the fun in that?

 
Lee intends to keep a few parts to repair that which he figures will break on our working tractor.  The rest of the parts he will put on EBay or craigslist and sell.  Those of you city dwellers don't realize that a farmer can take an old engine and use it to power all sorts of equipment that he has put together.  They are perhaps the last of the brilliant, self-taught mechanical engineers!  So, he figures someone will buy it.  What he doesn't sell or save for future use, he will sell for scrap. 

Lee thinks he can break even or make money on the deal.  I have my doubts.  But he is enjoying himself with this new project, so it's all good.

Sold! maybe

Lee had the truck listed on eBay and it sold!  The first time no one bid above the reserve, so this time he had it as a "buy it now price" and it sold!

 

The new owner is in Oklahoma and we are not driving it there.  He must arrange for shipping.  But there are a lot of scams on eBay, so it isn't sold until we see the full price.   He has placed a deposit, so we will hold it for him until he makes the shipping arrangements.

 

I think Lee is pretty excited.  He wasn't sure he would ever make his money back on the truck.  He sold it for about what he has into it.  Assuming you don't count the many hours of work.  So I guess the work was the fun part.  And taking it to a few car shows.

 

And now he gets some money to buy a new car he has an eye on. 

 

Of course he is still working on the 1974 Camaro.  The carburetor is at a shop to be rebuilt. We are waiting on that and then it needs paint and a few tweaks.  Then maybe we will sell that and Lee can have only ONE car to be rebuilt in the shop!

What do you think we should paint it?  Red?  Black?

Mountain Magic in Fall

Lee entered the truck he is almost finished rebuilding in the Mountain Magic In Fall festival.  They close off the main street in Buchanan and have Bluegrass music, vendors and a car show.  Each year the festival gets bigger.  I parked in town and had quite a hike to get to the end of the vendors.  That is where the car show starts.  I heard that this year they had more than 100 vendors.

 

 

Not all the vendor spaces are selling things.  There are also politicians ready to convince you to vote for them.  There are various church groups, businesses, raffles or charities hoping to get your attention or dollars.  All the local antique shops are open and doing big business.  It is fun!

And I won't even go into the food you should never eat, but is ubiquitous at these kinds of events.  This is the first year that I was able to avoid a funnel cake.  Yay, me!  I was unable to avoid a pulled pork BBQ sandwich and most of a cotton candy on a paper cone.  Bad me.  But you must help support the local charities.  It is the thing to do.  All for them and not for me.

 

The day started out cool and overcast.  We got there early, about 8, so that we could get a close spot to all the action.  It was pretty close, but it was still a long walk to the center of town with the music.  As the day went along it became quite hot, in the high 80's.  So much so that I moved the chairs we brought into the shade the truck made. After all, it took me three years of working in the library to get rid of the farmer's tan I got from one year of working on clearing the property when we first moved here. 

I was hunched over by the front wheel and almost invisible to the passing crowds on the other side of the truck.  This afforded me the opportunity to hear a lot of the comments.  We noticed our biggest fans were old men in John Deere ball caps and young boys in John Deere T-shirts.

A very young girl with a high pitched voice said, "Green...and yellow!  Shiny!"

An older gentleman to his grandson, " My daddy had one of these.  We have a picture of him with it in the field."

A teenaged girl, "This is awesome!"  And a teenaged boy, "Nice looking truck.  If I had $15,00, I'd buy it."  He didn't and he won't, but it was nice to hear.

And another favorite, "15,000.  Is that all?"

Lots of people took pictures.  One couple seemed very enthusiastic.  I asked if either of them would like their picture taken to be put on my blog.  I warned them that if they were in the Witness Protection Program, that they should decline.  He did.  She didn't.

 


Does this mean he is in the WPP?

No Rush

Here is my advice.  It's free  Take it or leave it. 

NEVER tell someone that there is no rush for their services. 

Our architect, whom we do not recommend for many reasons, took SIX MONTHS to give us the finished drawings.  After two months we started gently pushing.  After four months I was mad.  After six months we took the drawings and ran to the county and THEN found out they had made multiple mistakes we thought they had corrected months ago.

 

Not so recently Lee took the truck he had just finished restoring to get paint.  "No rush, " he says.  We just got it back today.  It took them over three months.

 

There were many excuses.  They had to re-spray.  They couldn't re-spray because it was raining.  It has been raining for months, I agree.  But surely there are businesses where it rains a lot that can still get the job done.

No matter.  Here it is.

 

Now Lee can put the flat bed back on it and free up the lift for other work he has been putting off.

But what do you think?  Do you like the John Deere colors? Lee figured a flat bed truck would most likely go to a farmer and they just love that green paint!  It will match their tractors.  Once he finishes with it, we will drive it to a few cruise-ins.  Maybe display it for Mountain Magic In Fall in Buchanan.

Then sell it. 

But there is no rush.

Stump Pulling

   

Pulling stumps is not as much fun as it sounds.  We had some bushes that I think are Mountain Olive.  When we first moved here we were told that they were a nuisance bush.  We didn't see why.  THEN.. Now we do.

We had two big bushes, or maybe areas of bushes.  They were right in the middle of an area that we cut for hay.  I wanted to remove them.  But when we cut them down, there were big knots of stumps where multiple bushes all grew together. 

You can't leave big stumps in the middle of a hay field.  The grass will grow up over the stump so that you can't see it until you drive over it and it wrecks your equipment.  There is a very nice man named Aubrey that cuts hay here.  It would not be nice to ruin his very fine John Deere equipment.

One year we put a large empty stock tank on top of a field that we were going to have cut for hay.  It had been horse pasture for a few years and now it was available for haying again. Nicely fertilized hay, I might add.  Because it had been a few years and the grass covered the stump we wanted to make sure Aubrey knew to avoid that spot.  He told us that once he has cut a field he knew every rock and lump from then on.  I can't imagine knowing that in flowing fields of 3 foot tall grass, but I believed him.

But now we have cut down the Mountain Olive and he might not remember there was a bush where there is no longer a bush, and he might not believe we are the kind of idiots that would leave tractor killers about.  And kill his tractor.  So they have to come out.

If you use a chainsaw and it hits the dirt, then you just have a spinning chain and not a saw.  Instantly dull.  Don't ask me how I know this.  We tried to dig down around the stump, but there were roots as big as my arm in every direction.

   

Time to get out the tractor. 

   

We have some heavy chains we use for this time of work.  At one point the tractor reared up like in one of those tractor pulls.  Not good.  More digging.  More chopping with an ax to get rid of some of the roots.  More pulling.

   

Most of the roots are out.  We can cut the little ones with some hand tools and rake everything smooth.

   

 But not today.  Today I am beat.

   

My Contribution To Truck Rebuilding

Lee had been rebuilding a 1953 (or is it 54?  He has told me a thousand times and I can't remember) GMC one ton flatbed pick up truck.  He had the engine rebuilt and has been putting everything new and rebuilt together.  He drove it this week for the first time.  He just drove it far enough to take it out of one bay of the garage to the one with the lift.  Then he used the lift to remove the flatbed part.

This is where I come in.  I don't do car stuff.  That is Lee's area of expertise.  Before we were married I had a car, a truck, a motorcycle and a sailboat.  I could change the oil and the spark plugs and that was about it.  Then we got married and I happily turned over the vehicle maintenance to Lee.  Wood and paint are apparently MY area of expertise.

 

The wood on the bed is in seriously bad condition.  The idea was to sand it down and put a few coats of polyurethane on to protect it.  After a few hours with the belt sander we realized that the wood is not going to look good even with a shiny coat of poly.

 

Now the plan is to fill the checks and splits and coat the whole thing.  I am hoping to find some truck bedliner in a spray can.  We don't want to spend much more money on this thing.  We have probably put more money into it than we will ever be able to get back.  If we thought we could get our money back, the thing to do would be to buy all new oak boards and then use the polyurethane on that. 
 

 
These trucks aren't old enough or rare enough to demand high dollars.  But this is a real cool truck and we are using a lot of John Deere parts and colors.  There are a lot of farmers around here and John Deere is king.  I figure a farmer can have a truck to match his tractors and it will be useful besides.  A win win!

In the meantime, after we get it painted, it will be fun to drive it to a few of the cruise nights held locally. Buchanan has several Cruise In nights  If nothing else, we will have a useful truck until a "green" enthusiast buys it off of us.