Couple of things, one really stupid that I probably shouldn’t admit and another that was interesting to me and possibly no one else.
Sunday my son and I were rearranging and cleaning trash out of the shed. Most of the trash was about 75 extremely rusty tomato cages in poor condition that no one has any use for. Last time they were used, it was only 5 so the other 70 we’re taking up about 500 SF of otherwise usable space. Was planning to use the grapple to move some stuff but if you put the grapple on and don’t lock the pins it apparently has a tendency to fall off. Making it worse it was about 6’ up when it fell off so it broke a fitting on one of the hydraulic lines. We still were able to make enough room to get a boat and one of the antique tractors in the shed with room left over. Just had to use the forks instead of the grapple.
Being it’s a Tar River (NC USA company but apparently actually an importer of fine Chineseum) the fitting wasn’t available at the NAPA warehouse within walking distance of work.
Off to the local Kubota dealer where I bought it, only 15 miles away, who also didn’t have it. While I was there I saw they had several MX5400’s some open station some cab, an open station M90 something on giant R1’s, a M7060 with cab, MX6000, as well as several BX’s like my wife wants. Didn’t plan to look at them but got a work call that took forever so I wandered around, looked them over, sat on most of them. Since getting the L4701, I’ve several times thought maybe I should have gone with the MX5400 but at the time thought it was just a little too big. After sitting on it and pulling a tape to measure width with R4’s (it was a stupidly long call) confirmed, yeah it’s just too dang big for our property. Looked like a really sweet ride, though. That and the cabs. Sometimes would be nice but there’s no way I could fit a cab some places without major changes to the property. So I left the yard at the end of the call feeling a little better after confirming the L4701 was the absolute biggest machine I could have gotten in a Kubota tractor for our needs. Then went inside where they gave me the same story as NAPA; it’s some oddball metric thing they didn’t have. So I bought a hat and headed another mile and a half to the Parker hose and fitting store.
Talked to some customer at Parker for 20 minutes about how to set up the el cheapo air shocks he’d bought for a jeep that also had oddball fittings (which Parker had mates for in stock). Of course it took them about 2 minutes to bring me a $9.60 exact replacement once air shock man left with a bin full of hoses and fittings to rig up his jeep with the plan he, I, and another customer who was waiting on custom hoses for a forklift cobbled together. So next time I have a few minutes I’ll do the 300 hour service, spend 5 minutes replacing the fitting and replacing the piddling amount of fluid lost if it’s even noticeable.
Sunday’s job got done, nobody got hurt, total damage $9.60 but I sure did feel mighty stupid (and rightly so because that was really stupid).
