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.