He Says It’s Fun

Our son Travis was over here the other day helping me get some thing’s done on the tractor along with a couple of other chores. Terry keeps saying I’m taking advantage of him, which I’m not above doing, but Travis insists that he’s having fun, and who am I to disabuse him of that notion? Silly boy. 😊

The first order of business was using the Worx cordless angle grinder Terry had ordered from Amazon to grind down the torn metal on the inside of the body of the Kubota’s mid-mount mower from where I had bashed into a stump a couple of weeks ago. Travis really had the sparks flying doing that.

It took a bit longer than we had expected because of the position he had to work from, but the Worx grinder got the job done. We have several Worx battery powered tools and they are all excellent and affordably priced.

After Travis was finished with the mower, I made a few passes up and down the back pasture with it to make sure it was going to cut well and not have any other problems. He did an excellent job and it worked as good as new.

Tractors are notoriously unstable machines, and it doesn’t take a whole lot to turn one over, especially if you are operating on a hill or carrying a load in the bucket. Many tractor owners either fill their rear tires with different types of fluid to add weight and lower the center of gravity, or they add weights to the tractor. I had ordered a set of wheel weights from Kubota, and with the mower repaired, we set about installing them. The weights weigh 50 pounds each and bolt to the rear wheels, which already had holes for them to attach to.

Once again Travis did the brunt of the work. All I had to do was hold the weights in place while he reached behind the wheels and inserted the provided bolts through, then attached the nuts to them. After that all it took was a four-way lug wrench to tighten everything down and we were good to go.

Since we were on a roll, I asked if he wanted to help me with one more job, which was really pretty simple. I had purchased a bench vise during Harbor Freight’s parking lot sale the weekend before and we mounted it on the work bench in the barn. That’s definitely going to come in handy.

Like us, Travis has a lot of downed branches at his place and wanted to borrow my Earthquake 33968 K32 wood chipper/shredder to chop them up, and also to mulch a bunch of leaves to be used in his gardens. It’s been several weeks since I used the chipper so I wasn’t sure how quickly it would start up, but it did with no problem at all. I gave Travis a quick lesson on its controls and then we loaded it up and took it to his place. He said he would need it for a couple of weeks, but by the next morning he had already been hard at work with it and was covering paths in his garden with wood chips.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about another project he and I did while he was here.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us. This place is all about one stop shopping.

Thought For The Day – Whomever tries to drown their sorrows by drinking should know one thing – sorrows know how to swim!