Nothing like a Saturday morning fix

Dad called and said he was having troubles with the loader and needed my help ASAP. Earlier in the week he bent one of the rods on the dump cylinders, so I told him to put on 2 other ones we had in the shop that aren't quite right for that loader, but are atleast matched to avoid twisting and breaking something.

Long story short, Dad didn't pay attention at TSC when we was getting a new hose and some fittings, and the swivel connector he bought was a restricter fitting, and he still managed to twist the bucket and broke the end off one of the cylinders.

Instead of running 2 mismatched cylinders, I dug around and found the gouged but straight cylinder rod I had replaced last year in the other cylinder. I polished the rust off it and did a little work around the gouges, and then did a quick outdoor rebuild of the bent cylinder.

Still planning to replace the rod with new, but now it can wait until later on when the tractor can be down for a day while I do some machine work on it.

Donovan from Wisconsin

And some people wonder why farmers keep used parts laying around! When I was growing up everyone kept a pile of scrap metal out behind a shed somewhere. If something broke we looked around until we found something to fix it with. Most of us had neither the time nor money to go into town and buy a new part.

Dad had the county extension agent who helps with feed rations tell him to clean up all the "junk" laying around and scrap it earlier this year. He looked at him and said "unless it's in that spreader over there (pointing to our scrap hauler which is a junk manure spreader) it's still got a purpose, even if we don't know what it is yet"

We do have a dump box at our farm now which we are slowly cleaning some stuff and scrapping, but not much is going in without much consideration and contemplation. I'm working on our gehl green chopper right now, and will be robbing parts off our parts one behind the barn. Planning to go through it and perhaps pull off what we think we'll need or could be usefull and pitch the rest, but I don't think there will be much left on it for useable stuff anymore.

Same thing with an old Kools blower we have behind the barn. Ours got hit by my brother on a tractor earlier this summer, so I tore it down, cut out a good peice of metal from the other and patched it in, then I needed the cast pulley off the junk one that drives the shaker pan and auger. It had 2 peices busted out of it but I filled them in with Ni-rod, ground them down smooth and shaped the groove again for the belt. Ran up 8 loads of bedding with it so far and it runs great. Will finish stripping the old one of good parts and will scrap the rest.

Donovan from Wisconsin