Farmi Logging/skidding Winch...Mahindra design flaw? Tractor knocked out of commission...

hey guys chat here with doing a homesteaders out here working on the pond today I'm all by myself took a couple days off from work I got a lot of work left to do here I'm sure you can't see in the video but there's a whole bunch of orange X's on those trees over there behind me let's see over in there most of those trees need to come out but I'm using this winch I wanted to show you guys this I never even knew these things existed until just a couple weeks ago my neighbor told me about it I was gonna buy one of those grapples that goes on the back of the tractor that looks like a skidder grapple you know sort of like ice tongs or whatever but you have to back right up next to the log and you know working in a swamp like this especially when everything is fine can't always do that so this is a winch let me show you how this works alright so basically it's got this sort of bulldozer blade and you just set this right down and it digs into the ground and that's what the winch pulls against this one is a nor me nor MIT corporation farm II winch and I think it's rated for around 7,000 pounds or something but it just connects to the PTO the power take-off on the tractor here with this little flex coupler and it just runs on a chain I don't know if you can see in here there's a big chain focuses just runs on a chain and you control it by just pulling on this cable right here so you can stand back pull on this cord and that makes the winch go there's a clutch that engages but the ingenious part about it so you run this cable there's about 160 feet of cable and you run this cable out and in this case I've gone to the furthest log which is this one and these chains just loop around so you just slide this through you can see you just saw it slide this through the link it's got this great little threading needle on the end which makes it very easy to get it underneath the logs and then pull through pull it through the hole and at the end of the winch cable this little hook just hooks on there if we follow along to the next log it's got a slider and you just thread that needle through the slider and we'll go do that with the second one as well just pull this cable out over here pretty muddy today just set the camera down I don't have a tripod with me today all right so I got this one hooked up the trick is with these you want to get them as close to the end of the log as possible because when you pull this up against the winch you don't want to have the chains really far back because you've got to hook them onto the bottom of the bulldozer blade and you want to also hook this chain as close up to the hook as you can which I couldn't do because I had to move this log with the with the grapple and when I set it down it was on the chain so we'll go ahead and pull this in so you start the tractor up it runs just an idle speed turn on the PTO we step back a safe distance and when you pull on this cable and the sport it engages and it's going to pull through to the furthest log until it gets to the second log and now it's going to pull these together and I think we ran into a stump so I'm probably gonna have to back up and then just raise that winch up a little bit to get these up and over this stump that's the problem you can see how many stumps we got in here really even having to work our way around all of them alright so what I did here is I backed right up next to this stump you see we can get these up over the edge yeah so that was yesterday about ten minutes after I shut the camera off hooking those up I got stuck my front wheels drop down into a into a little ditch and there was a stump that was probably five inches tall and maybe five inches in diameter but jammed up underneath and I thought I pinched a hydraulic hose because there was fluid spray and everywhere so I messed around for a few minutes and tried to get unstuck and couldn't so I got out couldn't tell where everything was leaking tried to use the winch or raise the front end up and that wouldn't work so I shut the tractor off called my neighbor had him come down and we turned the key and it started really rough and it was knocking so I shut it off and upon further inspection discovered that that stump had actually hit the oil filter so I would say that this is probably a design flaw in this four-wheel drive off-road tractor because it cracked the oil filter and all the oil sprayed out of the engine so I'm hoping that it didn't do any damage the guys at the shop are not optimistic and they're coming to pick it up on Monday or Tuesday so fingers crossed that there's not any major damage to the engine cuz I had 25 hours on this thing so it was not a good day yesterday but I wanted to show you the design here and I need to come up with some way once we get this fixed to make some sort of additional shield on the tractor so that's the oil filter right there you can see that's the oil filter and I don't know if we'll be able to see the crack underneath there so basically got bumped by a stump that was sticking just up above this bar and put enough torque on it then it cracked it and all the oil sprayed out everywhere so I need to come up with some sort of a way to make a shield that either clamps on or bolts on or something to protect that because if it happened yesterday when I wasn't doing anything crazy compared to the stuff we were driving through the other day when we were home all the logs out of the swamp I'm worried that it'll happen again well shout out to my friend Brian who was building a house he's building a house next door for another friend of mine and he came down with his lolly yesterday and we spent about 45 minutes trying to get the tractor out of that hole that it was in we ended up breaking a chain trying to pull it and so then we in managed to get the lull around to the front and get the forks underneath the front end of the tractor and lift it up out of the ruts that it was in and put a bunch of logs underneath the wheels so that when it was lowered it stayed up above the rut and then we were able to to tow it from over and there somewhere off the front of the tractor to where it sits right now so fingers crossed thanks Brian so it's a beautiful day I've got the day off let it go take a peek and see exactly how much more we need to do it clear in the pond they're coming to pick the tractor up on Monday the sawmill guy is coming where's the pile of logs back over my shoulder right there coming on Wednesday to cut up all those logs so that's gonna be pretty cool I'll get some good video of that and then on the weekend Cornelius from whole systems design is coming down to do a walkthrough with the property and I'll give you guys a good overview of the plan that we've got in place I'm pretty excited to finally get working on those plans and see the homestead the permaculture homestead come to life but let's go take a look in the pond and I'll show you what more we still need to do in there so looking in this way is actually going to be where there's gonna be a little beach area and you can see it's so pretty it's pretty open we actually cleared a lot of trees out of there there's still some trees in there that need to come down but it's it's looking pretty good so this is sort of the northern end of the pond it's looking pretty clear here as well there's uh you can see the red ribbon on the tree over there that's sort of the western boundary of the pond there's a stream back in there so we kept about a 75 foot buffer so it's still a lot to drag out and the tractor is completely out of commission so I'm not sure how long it's going to take to get that assessed and repaired and get it back so we can get cranking again the thaw is coming and I would say within the next week or so it's going to be too muddy to really even be working out here so the pond clearing may have to wait until it dries out later on they're not supposed to start digging for the pond until probably July or August but you can see here hopefully if we zoom in all these orange X's on the trees all these need to come out the edge of the pond will be right over there that rock and those trees will define the eastern edge of the pond it would be some work to get these out and it's certainly not happening without the tractor and again gives me such an appreciation for what the axemen teams did back in the day with horses and axes and pulleys just crazy [Applause] this will be our farm road that kind of curves up in between the orchard and the pastures and then all this back up in here will be the pastures for the sheep and the goats and maybe eventually a cow getting pretty excited for livestock so so much needs to be done between now and let's say August first when we're trying to get our house on the market a little overwhelming who's taking one thing at a time I've been mapping out everything that we're gonna plant in the garden is here this is the first time I've ever just had an open open space for our garden we've always been confined to small boxes so I try a bunch of different stuff this year I'll do a video on that in a couple of weeks I'm also gonna try to get a bunch of stuff started here probably towards the end of March and if we can get the greenhouse done and I guess March April time frame then we'll be able to use that to house a bunch of the plants that we're starting still have all this stuff over here on the Left I can't quite figure out how to make it all go away so I'm gonna talk to Cornelius about this and see if we're gonna spread this out and use this for some of the mounds or the Swale construction just over time over the next couple of years well that's about it for today I'm gonna go run some errands I'm running down to the county store to pick up a woodstove kit one of those double barrel stoves got a bunch of free diesel fuel drums from a guy on Craigslist awhile back and I'm gonna make a couple of stoves so i bought the kit we're gonna make the first one put that in the garage that we have existing here now see how we do with that and then plan on making one for for the big barn as well they're pretty efficient and I think the whole kit was less than a hundred dollars so a couple of freaks free barrels and $100 worth of hardware for the kit see how we do so stay tuned for that video and hope you guys are having a good one is today Friday hope you have a good weekend and we'll talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: New England Homesteaders

Views: 83,496

Rating: 4.4089937 out of 5

Keywords: Farmi logging winch, Mahindra 2555, Mahindra oil filter, permaculture, homestead, pond clearing, homesteading

Id: aXXL6s-SGO0

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2018