Logging with the Farmi

With cold, but dry weather over the weekend it made for ideal conditions to do some tree clearing for the homesite.  This will take a number of weekends to complete and we are hoping to have this done before the trees bud.  Fortunately we have some labor saving machinery to help make this adventure more productive and quite a bit safer than when we cleared the driveway.  Any trees that get hung up in a fall we can put the winch on it and pull it down with relative ease from a distance.  When we did the driveway we had to hook up a come-along winch (hand powered) with a rope.  The tractor powered winch will easily pull 3-4 logs at a time from the forest up to the skid plate of the winch where I can then latch them and drag them up to the wood shed area where we limb, buck and split them into firewood.

Wood Chip Manufacturing

On December 20 out at the farm we were confronted with light flurries on and off in the morning so instead of getting down to all the painting we chose to set up the chipper on the MF240 and knock out a few hundred pounds of wood chips.  We decided to use our little trailer to catch the chips so that we could move them to wherever we needed them later on.

Positioning the tractor to hook up the chipper.

A great country that makes great things!  Thanks Wallenstein for building such a robust and reliable wood chipper.

Blogger maneuvering tractor after scraping some mud with loader to see if it could do some basic grading on the south gable end of barn where the 8' lean-to is going to be installed.

Tractor electrics on the fritz

We received the replacement hardware and installed the other half of the gate.  However as you can see we still need to add the bracing on right side gate.  Eventually we'll finish it but for a good part of the day we spent tinkering and learning how to operate our tractor. 

Scott is presently researching an electrical issue with the tractor starting system.  Sometimes it starts sometimes it doesn't. The battery seems to be holding a charge so next thing he says we need to look at are starter solenoid, battery cable connections and the (neutral) starting switch.  Good thing the operator and shop manuals arrived last week.  Nonetheless we were able to practice driving up and down the road a few times and put it to "work" by carrying bales of straw down the hill to where we re-seeded.  I also installed some grass seed blankets in the ditch and pegged them with sticks to prevent seed wash-out in future rain storms.