I have a little John Deere that I bought following a doctor's suggestion. I was experiencing shoulder pain and he found that the ends of my clavicles were getting worn. He simply said, "You should get mechanical help." My wife was originally against the purchase but with the family doctor's boost, I got a little tractor that could get into the livestock housing we had then and could handle the hay, straw, feed bags and manure that we dealt with on a daily basis then. Now she refers to "our tractor" and she uses it as much as I do. She doesn't deal with anything attached to the back, but she really loves the front bucket and the little fork I had made for it.
That's great, sorta how I finally got mine, with the help of all of "you", here. Marie was skeptical about it; but coming around now. The tractors are so useful for all kinds of things. Makes dealing with heavy things, we cannot do anymore, "easy". We were being taken over with all kinds of vines, and storm damage; but I'm on top of it now.
Good for you and her Don, so far I haven't ridden Jakes tractor, may not be a good idea especially when the suns out, that really affects my vision, Jake would say, ' get your half blind self off my tractor.
I originally didn't want a hydrostatic transmission as I didn't like the "hum" sound, but I am glad I got the hydrostatic as I don't think my wife would ever use it if it were standard, and for most of my uses the hydro is the better choice.
My only second thoughts on that are when my hydrostatic tractor cannot pull out the smallest of saplings...it just stops. I often wonder if a manual transmission might work better.
Yeah, it might work better, but the manual would be better for your mowing probably unless you have cruise control on your tractor. On the manual transmission, you would just set the throttle and sit back and enjoy. You wouldn't have to touch any pedals as the throttle could be set by a hand throttle. You can use the hydraulic lift, either front or back, to pull small saplings. The front bucket would lift higher but the rear lift might be stronger. Again, you can attach a snatch block to a large tree nearby, and use a tractor-attached winch to pull them out with a cable.
I thin it's got a cruise control, but I've never used it. You've mentioned snatch blocks before. I've never used one. Can you point me to a website that shows how to set one up to yank saplings and to fell trees in a direction away from the tractor? I have some stumps from bushes and small pine saplings I gotta pull. I've tried a boom pole on the 3 pt hitch and the front end loader on some small stuff and it's not strong enough. I've used a come-along on the boom pole, but that's real slow work. My next option is to use a farm jack I picked up, but that's not gonna be speedy, either..
This is one way to pull stuff with a winch that doesn't even use a snatch block: This magnifies the previous: I would use a tree as an attachment rather than back to the vehicle/tractor. This is more what I do. I use an inexpensive Harbor Freight type tow web and one or more snatch blocks. Start around 7:20 of the video. Before that is just talking about their mistakes:
Thanks for that. I'll have to see if my 23hp tractor is strong enough to yank these small trees using a mounted tire. If it's not, I'll fire up my truck.
The tractor can probably get to places that your truck cannot. That is why I mounted an inexpensive ATV winch to my tractor. Not only does it pull stuff out, but it pulled roll fencing along one property line that I couldn't get a truck into unless I pulled out a lot of trees.
So I assume the weight of your tractor was sufficient such that when you turned on the wench, you yanked that which you wanted yanked, and it did not just pull your tractor towards the stuff you were trying to extract. The guy in one vid used a winch, but it was attached to a vehicle. At one point he chained the other end of the vehicle to a tree to prevent it from creeping. Years ago I thought of buying a winch for my tractor because of a chicken feeding cabinet I stumbled upon that had been dumped by the creek bed, I assume by the contractors who did rehab for the investor who I bought it from. (I'll upload pics later.) I wanted to salvage it.
So far when I put the parking brake on and drop the box blade the tractor has stayed in place. I guess I would tie or chain the tractor to a tree if I needed to do so, but I haven't encountered that yet and I really don't expect to have to pull out trees or stumps that big.