Posts Tagged ‘equipment failure’
Multiple Failures
Yesterday was a failure for me in two ways. My ill-conceived attempt to simplify the connection of the winch hook to the plow blade proved woefully insufficient. To distract me from that frustration, I turned on the Vikings football game and was faced with a profound embarrassment for the team and all of its fans.
It looked like we probably got around 5-6 inches of snow accumulation from Saturday’s storm. The ground isn’t frozen solid yet, and what little residual warmth still exists was making the base layer just sticky enough to be annoying. It stuck to the plow blade and to the shovels. It is such a draining tedium when half a shovel-full stays on the shovel after every attempt to toss it.
I have needed to plow so infrequently over the last two winters that I guess I’m out of practice. I forgot how much the nylon rope on my winch stretches as it gets repeatedly snugged with a constant back and forth from lifting and dropping the blade. The added weight of snow sticking to the blade exacerbated the issue.
The kicker that ultimately caused me to give up trying was that the mechanism to pull a pin back, allowing the blade to be angled, stopped working. I assumed it was frozen with packed ice and snow, so I parked the Grizzly back in the garage to be dealt with later.
That left me doing more hand shoveling than I would have liked, but I got enough done to receive our guests for brunch with the place looking satisfactorily welcoming.
Today, I will be giving the winch lift issue the time and attention it deserves to resolve it. I’m not sure if the problem with the pin for blade-angle adjustment was an isolated incident or something more concerning. The mechanism was used when we bought the ATV, and that was 13 winters ago. It won’t be a big shock if something’s just plum worn out.
Like any good glutton for punishment, I turned on the football game after our guests left. Ouch. Seriously, ouch. It was painful to witness. The one positive I can take from the spectacle of the offense’s epic ineffectiveness is that I have no reason to look for entertainment in watching them play for the rest of the season.
I’d rather settle into my favorite recliner and finish some of the books that I’m currently juggling.
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Making Decisions
With everything around here growing at warp speed, now would be a really bad time to lose the services of our Stihl power trimmer. Isn’t there a law of probability about this?
While Cyndie was making headway against the grass jungle taking over the gazebo on Monday, the trimmer became “wobbly.” She discovered the main drive shaft tube had suffered a metal-fatigue fracture.
That’s not good.
I dropped it off for repair in the evening, but their backlog of work is running at two weeks. It’s scary to imagine not being able to trim for that many days.
Cyndie thinks we should buy another one, and I am hard pressed to argue. There have been many times when we both could be trimming at the same time.
Pondering this. Something about it doesn’t feel right. I’m driven to balance the logic of a cost-benefit analysis, a crystal ball vision of what our future is here, and that unsettling gut feeling about the expense. Then I need to deal with the fact there is no right or wrong answer in the end.
You know me and decision-making. It’s not my favorite thing to manage.
One thing that I’m glad that we weren’t relying on me to decide, yesterday we got the details from our neighbor about his plan for the hay-field. It makes total sense to me now.
While he was cutting on Monday night, he was listening to the weather forecast. The outlook for rain all day Thursday was holding strong, so he smartly stopped cutting any more than he thought he could get dried and baled by the end of today.
We received encouraging news from him about our fields. He said the grass is real thick underneath, likely due to the mowing we did all last summer. In addition, he clarified that the tall grass going to seed was not Foxtail, as Cyndie feared (which is not good for our horses’ mouths), but the premium horse hay staple, Timothy.
We still have a long way to go in our transition from suburbanites to Ag-wise country folk.
(Brings to mind my stuttering pause into the phone when I was asked what kind of cows were trampling our property a couple of weeks ago. Um, big ones?)
Amidst the angst of dealing with equipment failures, it is refreshing to learn some good news about the outcome of our efforts to improve the quality of what is growing in our hay-field and pastures.
Despite all the challenges that continue to arise (and decisions thus required), Wintervale continues to evolve in an encouraging way for us.
Hurrah!
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Relative Something 