Each Fall we try to get the farm work wrapped up and get the equipment tucked away for a short winter nap.  In the midst of my final mow of the property, my heavy duty John Deere rotary cutter broke.  The two inch steel shaft that holds the blades on sheared right off.  Yikes!  as it turns out, it’s a very expensive part to replace with original manufacturer equipment, so I’m going to try to hack the mower together with an entirely different gearbox.  We’ll see what happens…

At this point, most of the maintenance work is done with the exception of making a couple of welding repairs.  The regular lawn tractor mowers get a bit more abuse than a typical home yard — we’re frequently mowing along, minding our own business to be startled by a just out of sight stump that stops the mower in its tracks.  I did a lot of welding to keep the cub together over the summer and now it’s time to do the same for the other tractor.

Chris generously spent the day with me helping to work on equipment and we had some fun experimenting with our farm welding techniques to repair the disc harrows.  Meanwhile, Bill tackled an unbelievable amount of wood splitting to set aside pine for boiling our maple syrup for the 2016 season.