Day 31 - Quick Hitch, Piranha Bar, Stump Grinder

Today is a very, very miserable day, and it's completely my fault, but I've got things to do. So, first off, remember me saying in a couple videos ago that poison ivy doesn't bother me, this stuff doesn't bother me too much? Well, apparently I haven't messed with it enough for me to be bothered by it. Because that, on my left arm, is all kinds of poison ivy that's starting to get a little bit better. On my right arm, that's all kinds of poison ivy that's starting to get a little bit better. My knees, down to my ankles, on both legs, all the way around, especially on the back of my knees, which is miserable. I've got nasty amounts of poison ivy, because, hey, poison ivy doesn't bother me, right? And then there's these little things called chiggers, these little itty-bitty bugs that are kind of like ticks, but they're smaller, and they're just fast, and I'm getting itchy thinking about them. I'll just dive you absolutely bonkers. They bite you once, and then they move a little bit and bite you again, and move a little bit and bite you again. Typically, you have three little bites in a row kind of a thing. Chiggers, I'm all tore up with chigger bites, so I'm trying not to scratch because of the poison ivy, and then the chiggers make me want to scratch more of the mosquito bites, and then I've got it on my wrist right here, where my watch normally is, so I can't wear my watch, and then I get sunburnt on the other side of my watch, because that side's been not exposed to the sun for so long. I have, like, a level EF5 whirlwind of man-cold nonsense going on today. I'm just itchy, miserable, hot, and sticky, but nothing works unless you do, so I've got some stuff that I need to get done. Speaking of getting stuff done, that's exactly what I have been doing. I borrowed a relative's rotary cutter. This thing has been abused. We've got all kinds of repairs here. We need a little bit more repair, because I've opened that up a little bit, and I've just been working this rotary cutter and getting some progress done on the property. I'm a little hesitant to keep pushing it, though, because that's not mine, and I don't want to tear up something that's not mine. Of course, I'll fix it if I tear it up, but I'd rather not do that at all. I've got a flat tire right here. I'm glad I didn't fill these things with some type of liquid, because everyone says, fill these, because ballast weight, and yadda, yadda, yadda. I've already got a flat tire. I also put a Piranha Tooth bar on the front to do better digging, and, oh wow, what a dynamic range situation. Sunlight's brutal right now. Anyway, this bar that you put on the front makes digging tremendously easier, if that is a way to describe it. What else? Yeah, I need to figure out a toolbox situation on this. This is my tractor. It's a Bad Boy 4035H. I purchased it in affiliation with Bad Boy, and it was either this one or the comparable Kubota model that, I forget the name, the model number of the Kubota, but it's their version of this, or vice versa, and I went with Bad Boy versus the Kubota, because the Bad Boy has twice as much lifting capacity. I think I can do 2,200 pounds, where the Kubota was 1,100, if I'm not mistaken, something like that, and I've been using this and had anticipated using the front end more than the back side over here, so I'm very pleased with the tractor so far. I'm about to hit my first service interval. I've got, I think it's a little more than 40 hours, and the first service is at 50 hours, I think. What else? Oh, yeah. Well, today, I want to add a quick hitch to the back side, because this three-point lifting system is kind of miserable when you're switching implements all the time, so rather than starting in on the stump grinder immediately, I want to put the quick hitch on. That way, the stump grinder's PTO shaft can be sized with the quick hitch, because that's going to change the spacing. So this is the Spico quick hitch, and I bought it from Good Works Tractor Company. I saw a bunch of his videos on YouTube, and he made a good argument for this particular quick hitch. It's a category 1 quick hitch that supposedly doesn't need bushings down here at the bottom. So a lot of these category 1 quick hitches have a much larger opening on the bottom, so you need to have bushings that slide over the shaft on your implement, so bushing to go over this shaft right here, so that that outside diameter of the bushing fits the larger hook. But this one, supposedly, you don't have to get the bushings, because this hook down here is sized appropriately for the implements. This should make installing and removing implements on the three-point side of things way, way easier. All right, so I got all my pins put back together in there, and tried the quick hitch on the rotary cutter, and no bueno. The rotary cutter spacing is off. So this is an old implement, by the way. We're pretty good on that side, but on this side, too much of a gap. Spacing's off. And, of course, this swivel up here on the top linkage is causing problems with the top hook. So, no big deal. It doesn't work with the rotary cutter, nah, no big deal. I mainly got it because of these implements. This is the stump grinder, which I'm about to hook up to. Open the box and hook that up. That is quick hitch compatible. That's not. I have sprayed and sprayed and sprayed and sprayed and sprayed, and I cannot find this leak anywhere. Not on the valve stem, not on the outside of the tire, not on any part of the tire that I can access. So, I guess I'm going to monitor it. I guess I'll monitor it. Oh, that's dark. And we'll just see if I can't find the leak later. It's spring in Mississippi, which that means it's a lot of rain here. It's crazy hot and humid. It's starting to get hot, but it's always humid here. And the rain has spread out just enough to where the property is staying muddy. It's not really drying out. It's not going to rain today, but the property's just too muddy to be out there. So, I started doing a little bit of work on the tractor yesterday, and today I'm going to pick up on that and just check a few boxes. I thought that looked like a wrench. All right, I'm an archaeologist now. A little bit of WD-40. That'll be good to go. These bigger zip ties are kind of hard to come by, so if you unlock them, you can reuse them. Well, that took longer than expected for a few different reasons. I couldn't find my big torque wrench. Finally found it. I couldn't find my calipers. Ended up having to go to town and buy another set of calipers, and I think I had to buy something else. I can't remember. Well, the stuff to fill up the tires. Find the tire leak. I couldn't find the tire leak, so that's another thing that's kind of bumming. I'd love to plug the tire if I could, but I couldn't find it, so I have no idea where the leak is at. Didn't get that solved. The quick hitch works with this stump grinder perfectly, so I'm happy about that. I'm a little disappointed that I waited as long as I did to get the quick hitch, because when I set up the PTO shaft for the wood chipper that I have from Woodland Mills, I ended up having to cut a few inches off, which I wouldn't have had to do if I had the quick hitch, because that adds an extra three or four inches of length, which means I may end up having to buy another PTO shaft if I want to use the wood chipper with the quick hitch, which, yeah, that kind of sucks. The break-in sequence on this clutch for the PTO shaft was a little bit interesting. I had to take everything loose, completely loose apart, mark the clutches to make sure that there was actually some movement on there, install it, run it for two or three seconds, shut it off, run it for two or three seconds, shut it off, make sure that there was movement on the clutches, and then the clutch springs need to be set to a specific height for the horsepower on my tractor. My tractor has 29.5 PTO horsepower, might as well just say 30 PTO horsepower, and that required a spring spacing of 1.24 inches. So that was interesting. And everything's done now. So I should be out in the woods right now trying to use it, but this morning we woke up with like an inch of rain within an hour, which was kind of ridiculous. So again, everything's flooded. So tomorrow, for real tomorrow, I'm taking this thing out, we're going to grind up some stumps. That's it for this video, you guys take care, have a great day, and I'll talk to you in the next video.