Watch This Before Buying a New Tractor - Bailey Line Life #6

Just making a little video about the tractor

Oh yeah. Yeah. How are you? Good. Run robber. Steve's son. Oh yeah

This tractor's been an interesting journey. It has, eh? A lot of things to fix on it, but running pretty good when it runs

Oh yeah. Yeah, they're old, but they work good, eh? Oh yeah, they do. Yeah. Yeah

Those looks sturdy. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. We're rated at 14,000 pounds

Wow. Yeah. But carry lots. I am. I'm sorry to get your tractor back

I am. I'm sorry to see it have to go on the first place again

but that other tire let loose and they have a fix. I just want to explain something that I've noticed

You're welcome. Thank you. This is a I just want to explain something that I've noticed over the years

and you might find it useful. And it has to do with the relative value of used and new machinery

This is a 60 horsepower tractor. It's got an eight foot wide blower on it

There's a loader on the front with a... with a hydraulic grapple hook. It's not a pretty tractor

but it cost exactly the same amount of money as that snowblower

I got both of these machines for $3,500 each. My point is how much more value you can get with used

if you're willing to put up with lower reliability and a greater need to start turning wrenches

or getting help with things. I love that snowblower. It's a great snowblower and it's perfect for walkways and things around the house

Close quarters work. But just in terms of raw horsepower, there's of course no comparison

And a tractor like this does a lot more than just blow snow too. It did take some tender loving care to get it to this point

And, you know, I'd say maybe once every couple of months or every three or four months

or certainly every six months, something goes wrong on this thing. And I have to do a little bit of fixing

But when you actually figure out how long it, takes you to fix things and the cost of parts and things like that, it still works out really well

Tractor like this, even a good used one, could easily be $50,000. And I just, you know, I don't

have that kind of money to spend on a tractor that I don't really use all the time. So that's the

philosophy. This blower is kind of interesting, though. This was growing moss in a forest somewhere

and there were lots of things on it that didn't work. The chute was kind of rusted in place

so it couldn't swivel. I freed that up, and then I installed this hydraulic cylinder here

so I can control the direction of the chute from the seat. This chain broke, drive chained

Brokechene. Whenever you use a machine heavily, like blowing snow, the weakest lengths are going to break

and it takes you a little while to shake things down. This bearing went bad shortly after I started using it

The first year. I've never had any trouble with the blower after that first year

after we got through all the shaking down process. This business about buying used and learning how to maintain it and how to fix it

It's actually a very economical way to do it when you can afford to. For many people living in the country where you don necessarily need your equipment all the time this is a very good option And you know despite the bumps along the way I think it makes sense This was tractor was new in 1977

It's a hydro-84, which means it doesn't have a clutch like a regular tractor

I kind of wish it did. I prefer the conventional, traditional transmissions, but it's a kind of hydrostatic drive

One of the things I added to this was a set of tire chains

This is just a two-wheel drive tractor. And without these chains, it was completely useless in the snow

It couldn't even push the blower into snow very effectively on any kind of a rise

The tires are filled with calcium chloride solution. You know, they're very heavy, it's weighted tire, but the chains have made all the difference

The thing about a chain, the tire chain is that it has to be kind of loose in order to go on

because there's slack in different places as you put it on. But in order to be effective for use, it has to be..

to be fairly tight. This is what this wire is all about. I can do up the tire chains and they would

work okay, but they'd be pretty floppy. This wire arrangement here solves that problem quite

nicely. This is an electric fence tensioner. It's made to tighten up high tensile electric fence

wire, but it actually works well for tightening any kind of wire. So here's some fence wire

It's not as heavy as it comes. It's kind of a medium-sized wire. But slipped through the links in between every space all around and then tightened up here

makes for a really nice installation. It's as tight as it can be, and it's simple to do, and it's easy to remove

and it just works really well. When I bought this tractor from a friend of mine, he delivered it on a float

and it was running, working kind of okay. There were a few things

I had to fix the first thing I did was to fix this muffler. The tractor came from the

factory with an exhaust pipe and muffer that stuck up straight, but it was purchased by a

farmer who had some low barns that he wanted to get into, so he changed the exhaust manifold

and now we have this underslung muffler, which is fine, I like it. It gets the exhaust out of

your face better than the other one would, but it was just flopping around. In fact, the exhaust actually

the exhaust pipe actually stopped here. So this section of pipe wasn't there. But luckily enough, I found a piece of pipe at an auto supply place and it just jammed into the muffler perfectly. It was a nice tight fit in there. So I stuck it in and I brazed around the outside and that's worked perfectly. Everything else is quite sound and solid. Let me see if I can get in and see that braise there. Just a second

There's the muffler and you stuck it in there and there's where you brace

So there was a hole in there and you just stuck it. There was a hole where some other kind of pipe went in

I don't think it went all the way back as far as this one. I think it might have ended sooner. I don't know

I never saw it. Now the muffler didn't have much supporting it either

So I find that chains do a great job holding any kind of an exhaust system

I do this on my truck all the time. Instead of a solid mount, the chain option gives it a little bit of flex and movement

which helps it to last longer. You see, you threaded a bolt through that metal piece and hung the chain from that

Right, and I have the same thing going on at the back end, because that exhaust pipe is now quite long and it goes all the way out to the back

Oh yeah, so there's the other chain. Yeah, it just works really well

Now there was another problem. You can come down under here. You're going to pay me extra for this

extra for this the exhaust pipe leading from the engine from here there was a joint here where it started to meet this bent part

And that was, well, it was together, but it wasn't sealed. It was kind of, you can kind of move it from side to side

So a lot of exhaust was coming out there. I got this repair band for muffler

It actually was a little bit too big to grip this pipe properly

But the idea is that it's a stainless steel band that goes around the pipe and then you can tighten it up

It's used for exhaust repairs. The problem was it was a little bit too big. So if you see here, there's some other metal

What I did was I got the next size up of exhaust pipe, a short length of it, split it in half lengthwise so that I could put one half here and one half here

And I slathered the whole thing with high temperature silicone. It's actually a great muffler cement, I guess

It's far better than traditional muffler cement because it remains flexible. So slazzoed the whole thing with the high-temperature silicone and then did up this band clamp and three years of use and it's rock solid

So that's not going anywhere. That saved me a huge amount of hassle that I otherwise would have faced if I had to change this pipe

So sometimes MacGyver-type fixes are the way to go. they save you a whole lot of trouble. And once you get involved in old machinery like this

and you start taking things apart, I mean, there's no telling what's going to break, what bolts

going to be seized up. Minimal intervention for a great repair is what I find works quite well

One of the problems that I ran into with the tractor is that the starter motor pooed out

maybe a year after I got it. There are a lot of seat of the pants modifications to this tractor and

And I think one of them might be down around here to do with this loader

I don't know what's a factory part and what's been fabricated on firm

But anyway, the starter motor's way down here. Okay, this is the starter drive, like the electromagnetic bendix starter drive type thing

And then the starter motor, which is, I know it's huge. It's down here

So it's hard to get at, but I needed to take it off. in order to get it rebuilt

And there are bolts that hold that on. I don't know if you can see them

but there's three bolts. There's one here. And then there's another one over there

and there's another one underneath. I could get a wrench on the other two, but I couldn't get a wrench on this one

because there's not enough room to move the wrench. I could get the wrench on it, but I couldn't actually turn it

So I struggled and puzzled for a while, and I've made a video about this before

but I'll just mention it again. That's when I board, a hole through the frame here. Total thickness of that is it's about three quarters of an inch of solid steel and I used

Believe it or not a bi-metal hole saw didn't burn out the drill and the whole saw

Was pretty well just as sharp as when I started now I did take it easy and I did use lots of real cutting oil on this

I think I probably would have burned out the whole saw if I had just gone at it dry metal full speed so I did take it easy and I and I

I lubed it up a lot pretty amazing. The plug of steel I removed. There's actually two layers there. There's a

thinner layer which I think is on the outside and then a thicker layer, but it adds up to

more than three-quarters of an inch. It took me about 20 minutes to remove that and this is

the whole saw that did the job Still quite good I mean it the teeth are sharp enough that you can still feel the they still grab your finger they not quite as sharp as new I think I lost the tip of this tooth but considering what

it cut through I'm pretty impressed last summer when we were cutting wood my son Joseph was

driving this and all of a sudden the clutch pedal fell fell to the floor under its own weight

couldn't drive unless you put your foot under it and lift it up what happened was this

return spring broke now this is a new one I've put in here Just from the hardware store, just a regular small town hardware store had a great selection of, in this case, expansion springs

That solved the problem. So when the tractor wouldn't drive properly, I started my research under here because I knew there were some valuable things

This control lever here, a zillion inches of slack in it, but when you push it all the way up, it makes the tractor go forward

and then all the way back it makes it go back and in between it's neutral

And there's a certain amount of variability. I mean, if you put it part way through

you can get a kind of a lower gear arrangement. One of my complaints with this tractor

is that the gearing is not low enough. There are times when I wish for lower gearing

Nothing I can do about that. But anyway, the problem was I would put it all the way forward

and the tractor wouldn't drive. What's going on? So I was looking at these valves here

and I noticed something, something that you don't notice now. When I moved this around, there wasn't just rotation of this piece

There was actual movement of it. So the hole that's in this piece that swiveled on this bolt had gotten too big

For me, it was just all the years of working it back and forth, had made this hole too big

And when I put this up, there was enough slop. from that oversized hole that I wasn't pulling the valve far enough to actually make it actuate properly

I mean sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. I took this out and I saw that the hole was too large in this piece and there was also some wear on the shank of this bolt

So I took it apart, took this piece off, built up some weld on the inside of the hole, more than I needed

And then I redrilled that hole. Also built up the well, the metal on the outside of the shank of the

of this bolt and ground it down and just fooled around with it for a while until I had a good

swiveling fit but no extra slop and that's all the problem so it's just a perfect example of how

sometimes it's just the tiniest little things that you need to fix and if you think about it for a while

you can save yourself a lot of money yes it takes me time to do this but not as much time as you'd think

not as much time as I would lose paying for a more expensive better tractor now what I

like a more expensive better tractor? Yes. I might not want a brand new one though. As with a lot of

things in the world, various forces, mostly bureaucratic and governmental, they're making

machinery worse than they used to be. I've talked to a number of guys, mechanics their whole lives

They much prefer, say, a tractor from the 80s or something like that, which doesn't have any

electronics on it. It's all mechanical. There's a certain vintage of John Deere tractor

four-wheel drive, that ultimately one day I'd like to replace this tractor with if I can

find one at a good price. For now, I really can't complain. This old, heavy old beast does a good

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