Home on the Hill

Looking South East at 8 am. I managed to get Tom's skidsteer stuck in my driveway day before yesterday. Mine was out of commission with some intermittant problems. Yesterday morning we hooked the Drott skid shovel up to it and pulled it out. Hydraulic fluid was squirting out of a hose connection so I drove it the 7 K back to Tom's place. There we discovered the problem wasn't a broken hose but a leaky one. Easily fixed with a couple of twists of a wrench. Lesson learned: Look at things without assuming. My niece and her boyfriend, Brian, dropped by. Brian is a mechanic and he brought a tool case of automotive electrical connectors and wire. We cleaned up some of the wiring, dried out the distributor, taking care to ensure all the spark plug connectors were tight and Voila! I'm back in the snow removal business. We also put on a new set of heavy duty, spiked, equipment chains on the back tires. Huge difference. Once again the old adage: " you get what you p...

A friend who is a heavy duty mechanic showed up yesterday to do an oil change in the Drott Skid shovel. It froze up a winter ago because it had water in the transmission oil. We drained it and flushed it out several times before filling it with new oil. We also changed the oil in the final drives, one of them practically empty. Just bad maintenance. Up and running trying to get that oil circulating. This machine can move a lot of snow. Or gravel. Or the clay mountains at the ends of the tire garden. Not that we put it out to pasture, like it looks in this pic, but really it didn't have to be right next to the house. It's not like some one is going to steal it away in the dead of night. I think we are starting to realize that we have enough land that we don't have to keep everything within fifty feet of the house. The nearest neighbor is a couple of kilometers away and were not exactly crowding the fence line. I want to get the area clear of heavy equipment and put a...