Jon Gets It Done

We have one big old tractor that Ellen used to call the Old Lady or Big Red.  The tires are as tall as I am, and to get on it I have to put my foot on the step that is higher than my knee, grab the handles and haul myself up two more steps.  It's an International 766, it's the tractor that weighs 11,000 pounds and it's about 55 years old.  In the last few years it has had some major maintenance done, and last summer it was like driving a new tractor with all the dials working and a brand new seat and a feeling of total reliability.

Except that something went wrong toward the middle/end of the season, of course, and there was hydraulic fluid spraying all over my feet when a line popped and the steering went out. I abandoned that tractor in the middle of the field on multiple occasions, and Jon kept fabricating pieces that would get her going again for another little while before she blew out again.  We didn't really want to go  back to the same mechanic for the third time since it seemed like we needed a new person to look at it. We asked our mechanic/farmer friend for his best recommendation and he said there was a guy north of Harrisburg that he trusts.

This guy had a backlog of work for months. He said he didn't have room for the tractor until January. Well, we went on vacation in January, forgetting to figure out how to get the tractor up there. When we got home we realized we had squandered a whole month of repair time. I started to get very antsy, pestering Jon constantly about figuring out how to move the tractor.

First we thought we could find a trailer to borrow, so it took a couple of weeks to move through all those possibilities and find nothing. Then we thought we would have to pay someone but when we finally found someone who said yes, he said it would be $700 one way. Jon just couldn't accept that price. But then the guy who made that offer said he would sell us the trailer for $4000, he didn't really want it anyway.  So, if you think about it one way, if we had to pay $1400 round trip for that one trip, the trailer was only costing us $2600.  Sort of.  Jon bought it, brought it home for our mechanic to look at, they discovered it needed a whole new set of brakes. The calendar pages were flipping past. And this winter has been so warm the ground hasn't frozen so the calendar is going faster than usual, by more than three weeks.

It took another week to get the brakes fixed and Jon had the tractor loaded as soon as the trailer was ready.  He let the rig sit overnight so he could leave early in the morning. But of course there was a flat tire on the trailer by morning. Good to know.  Unloaded the tractor again, found a place that could do the work on a Saturday morning, got two tires fixed, loaded the tractor up once more and headed north.

Phew. He made it.  And when he got there, he had a comprehensive tour of this guy's shop full of tractors. He said there were piles to the ceiling and tractors broken into pieces all over the place. But Jon left there feeling confident that our tractor will be fixed soon and we will be able to start the season on time.

Go, Jon, go. This project took about a month and so far all that happened is that a tractor got moved 125 miles.  I did get the paperwork from the DMV finally, after another two more trips back there and another four hours of time.  They never did say how someone took our title away, but at least they got it back.

Farming is so romantic.