I'm sorry about your loss. Traditional wisdom is wait a year before making major changes, maybe that applies here.
In the meantime, if you could post pictures of the attachment areas of your tractor, bucket and forks, we could see what you're dealing with. You may have to have 5 postings before you can post pictures, IDK. Or you might PM (OTT calls them conversations) them to me and I'll post them.
I first really want to thank everyone for responding... this has been super helpful to make my decision not to trade. I had that feeling, but everyone helped solidify what I was feeling.
I am slowly leaning how to use the tractor... I live in Houston and we just had Hurricane Beryl come through and I had 8 massive trees come down. I had fun running the logs and dumping them in a dumpster and somewhat learned how to use the tractor... in addition to getting it stuck and learning how to use the bucket to get myself out
To make everyone laugh, I ran it in its low gear for a week and literally drove .005 miles per hour until someone asked me why I was running it so slow...turns out, it goes faster... I had no idea. I can only imagine what all the tree guys were thinking as I was slowly tooling around getting the logs moved.
This is the only picture I have off hand. When I get home I take pictures and can post the bucket and forks specifically. For the forks he basically ran a threaded rod (probably 2" or so) through the eyelets that are welded at the top of the bucket, rod went through the holes at the top of the forks and then through the eyelets.
for the others comment, I think this tractor has less than 400 hours on it, and its kept as shown in the picture below, not really in my way