I don't want to own every piece of farm equipment. Well that isn't exacty true, I do, but have no place to store it all nor the means to buy it all. Certainly a Combine isn't useful in the palmetto swamps of Florida.
One fundamental piece of equipment, a fertilizer and seed spreader, I borrow for the time being from a neighbor. It holds 300-400 pounds and works just fine behind my tractor...or so I thought.
I left it attached over night to dry from cleaning and the next morning the hydraulics had sunk to the ground with the implement. The extensible link between the 3-pt. hitch and the spreader was bent over the tractor's draw bar to almost a 15 degree angle (luckily not kinked). Now the linkage will no longer retract by hand. Only the tractor's hydraulics are strong enough to move it in and out completely. You need to be able to work it by hand to fit the tractor to the implement or to get them apart.
The shaft is a strange shaped hollow oval tube; one inside the other. I've tried heating it and allowing it to self bend into its original shape. I am close but not there yet. I can get 3/4 engagement by hand before it binds. Both parts "look" straight. When tested with a straight edge, there is the slightest of bends in the smaller piece. Getting that last little bit of bend out is TOUGH.
Today I will try to regain the final 1/4. After that I either buy him a new one or get it to the machine shop to make it work. I think too highly of my neighbor to let him down on this. It will be "as good as new" or he gets the new one and I keep the old.
