Monday was a big day of work here. There were about twenty people here
and most of them had bush and grass knives cutting grass in the low
areas for me to fill. One of these areas has been our 'swamp' area for
a long time, so I was very excited to fill it in. However, as I was
pushing material into the hole, therefore chasing out water, I broke
through my new surface and instantly sunk in to my axles. It took ten
guys an hour to put enough rocks, logs, and dig out my ruts to get back
the two and a half feet to solid ground. Ick.
After that I took lunch, it was after one thirty and as I raised my arm
to crawl up onto our porch I noticed that my arm hurt... I looked over
and realized that I'd missed a spot on my arm where I hadn't liberally
applied sunscreen. It was already an unhealthy shade of pink.
At this point I was feeling pretty good... I'd had two fairly bad things
happen today and was ready for the afternoon... I shouldn't have been.
Right at the end of the day as the sun was setting, or getting close to
setting, I put my foot down to shift gears, but the tractor wanted to
keep moving forward. Since the fear of going back into a similar deep
hole as this morning had my reflexes heightened, I quickly jammed the
pedal to the floor while shifting into neutral. Cautiously, I applied
the clutch and shifted into gear... Good so far. Now, let out the
--jump!... The clutch was shifting about a quarter inch from the
floor. Time to go back to the shop!
At the shop, a quick inspection told me I was not leaking anything, and
all the major pieces were still accounted for. Looking under the dash
to where the clutch pedal goes I was greeted with a ratty end of a
clutch cable held together by four thin and worn strands of the
originally 3.5mm. Talk about skin of your teeth.
Unfortunately today required loosening the fuel tank, which required
draining it, and taking off a frame bracket, which required two of us to
stand on the wrench to break it loose, not to mention the six or seven
hours it took to accomplish this. Finally, the cable has been removed
in all it's 700mm glory... Since I don't have another one of those here
(yet), I attempted to fix it... so far no luck. The ends on those
cables are pretty hard steel and I can't just drill through them and
braze the cable back together like I thought I could for a "temporary" fix.
Any bright ideas for a field repair?
1 comment:
praying for you today. hoping you are well.
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