Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Tractor Work


Phil's project for the day was to work on the tractor. We suspected that the starter had gone out, and that he would have to make a drive over to the Shenandoah Valley to buy a new one. The one silver lining in that prospect was that he could also buy a spring that fit the broken mower.

So he headed up to the barn to do one last tinkering.

An hour later, he came in to tell me that he had two pieces of good news and one piece of bad.

The bad was that the mower would need to languish a bit longer without a new spring.

He had been able to get the tractor started! His problem solving abilities saved the day again: something like a circuit he tested wasn't completed as it was connected, but when he touched the battery underneath the circuit, it would still work. So he cleaned the connector and tightened it down very hard, and it worked. The other benefit was that he noticed that a bank of fuses was missing one. He tested it and realized that all his gauges would work again! Apparently, the one time the tractor was in the shop, it came back without the gauges working. Well, they must have removed the fuse and not replaced it.

So that was very exciting.

He went down to dig out a drainage ditch to let the crawlspace drain.


That was a pretty intense amount of digging. He dug for some time.

Isaiah dug for about an hour.

Phil dug more.

I think, by day's end, he had dug all he could with the tractor (difficult access in some ways), but if he needs to dig some by hand, at least he doesn't have to dig the entire trench, some of it five feet down.

Excellent!

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