Hi guys,
Its been awhile since I last posted, due to the terrible economy over here my own business has suffered a lot and I had to get a job working in a quarry to make up for the low income, they got me 60 hours a week hard facing the be-jesus out of everything metal that the rock touches as it goes too and from the crusher units.
My schedule is 3.30 pm to 1.30am 6 days a week to which I don’t mind too much because it allows me to service my existing customers that still require my help so I would like to share a little of what I do in my spare time to make ends meat, sorry to say I don’t get much machining time which I miss but at least I have a job!
Here is a rather large John Deere tractor that one of its many tasks is to in the autumn load the big square bales onto trailers ready for hauling, this client likes to load two at a time to save in loading costs and time, the problem he was having was the top bale would lurch forward and tend to want to fall towards him and land on the bonnet of the unit and crush it so I made a simple crush bar to prevent the load shifting.
My next project was to improve the front end of a International tractor that was made in the seventies, the owner has completely restored the unit and spived it all up and made it into a Tractor Pull unit, this is where they attach a sled to the back of it with a weight on a conveyor, as the unit blasts down the track the weight creeps forward and steadily applies more pressure to the unit eventually stopping the whole show the further you get makes you the winner. What I built for him was the front end weight rack combined oil cooler reservoir tank fixture, they weigh the front end down for obvious reasons and it was his design to install the oil tank to give him a little advantage.
My next job really bothered the crap out of me!. My good friend and client Henry who farms 2000 acres around the corner from me phoned and asked me to rush over the farm and help dig out that John Deere tractor pictured in the first few pics, he just that week purchased from a John Deere dealership a fork lift attachment for his rig, and was lifting a grain feeder trailer in the air to move it over to another pasture to feed ducks, halfway across the field the load tilted and smashed to the floor and slid in a berm mangling one of the forks, on inspection the weld failed. As you can see in the pictures there was no weld to hold the load, when will industry learn to stop importing products from the far east that have no engineering standards to adhere to and market and sell the product here with a brand name plastered on it giving the impression you are getting quality, this could have killed someone least of all do severe damage to equipment. Yet they still expect loyalty to there brand name. you make your own mind up! BTW i stripped the other one down and repaired it too.
I got a call from a friend who told me he was bringing over a dump truck that needed the back end re-skinned, i hate this type of work because you can loose money on it, but low and behold this was a dream to work on and he got a deal of a lifetime, this is a GM dump truck equivalent to a Ford F-650, was made in 2007 with 6000 miles on the clock, he got it off Ebay for $8000 . This was a salt truck that belonged to some county in Georgia (where it snows once every 20 years) the nit-wits piled salt into the bed and left it in and over the years the salt ate through the skin, some humble public servant of that said county wrote off at tax payers’ expense the truck as it was not safe and my buddy landed his deal, it was only the bed that was trashed, the frame was perfect with rust-cote, hydraulics and take offs were in mint condition, by the time I had finished this work he had tripled his investment.
Next Wednesday in my lunch hour I have a little tiging to do on the space shuttle!
God Bless. Anthony.
