29 Year Old Farm Equipment put to the test again...keeping things greased

[Applause] hey folks this is Josh Turner each farmer welcome to the farm blog today well once again it's hey mowing time so I've been out mowing with the bush hog cleaning up the land a little bit and getting ready for hay mowing time so you got to make hay while the sun is shining quote-unquote well it's absolutely the truth the sun is shining it's about 84 degrees the wind is blowing it's time to get over here and we've got about 25 acres of hay to cut today we're gonna let it dry overnight tonight and we're gonna let it dry all day tomorrow we'll rake it and we'll Bale it the day after tomorrow so I'm gonna take you around the equipment here and show you a little bit about the prep work that goes into mowing hay and what you might need to know in case you're gonna bale hay or mow hay or whatever it is that you're gonna do with hay on your farm well take you around the machine here this is a new holland 492 hey vine will take you around it show you what's going on talk to you a little bit about the tractor and then we're gonna get busy all right every time we get on the tractor we need to do a visual inspection we need to kind of go front to back side to side do a visual inspection you can see I've been mowing here and I've already cleaned out most of these little fuzzies that are in the grill but we need to make sure that that is nice and clean so then we don't get an overheating issue and you can see right here this needs to be gotten out that's fuzz balls that were on weeds that I've been mowing so get rid of those that way they'll grow in the gravel next year if you want grass to grow just put some gravel down so we'll go all around the tractor there are two lubrication points right here where this front end axle articulates and we need to make sure that those places are nice and well lubricated all the grease fittings are well lubricated and we pulled our loader system off so we did have a John Deere loader system on the front right here and we pulled it off basically all you have to do is pull two pins and disconnect your hydraulic lines right over here so basically our quick visual inspection just shows me do I have a tire with a hole in it do I have anything going on am i dragging something up underneath it is everything okay do I have oil pouring out of it and we'll reach in here right here's a dipstick and we'll check our oil okay so pretty much we don't have a rag with me right now but we'll check it right here in just a minute we also want to make sure that we don't have any significant oil leaks now I've got a little bit of oil kind of collecting dust right here anywhere you see dust on a brand new tractor that means there's oil leak out somewhere so we need to check into that at some point we'll go around and make sure there's nothing sticking out of any tyres or anything like that everything looks pretty good we're gonna put everything together so this is not a three-point setup this is a pin system that holds the tongue in place I want to make sure our key is in place down here I'm gonna hit all of our lubrication points one two three lubrication points right here this has one single hydraulic hose and that single hydraulic hose runs back to a cylinder on the back and we'll talk about that here in a second when I go through here and we want to inspect we want to take a look at all of our teeth and I like to lubricate these teeth okay I want to make sure that there are no teeth broken off so that I don't leave one stripe of grass somewhere sticking up I want to make sure that all of our little bearings here are lubricated and ready to go and I sprayed a little bit of oil right on to each one of these bearings I think they're one two three four four or five of these roller bearings in this roller setup right here going to go around and I'll show you the lubrication points oh there's a lubrication point here to lubricate the bearing which is in there for this big ol roller right here I like to make sure once again that my blades are nice and lubricated you can see this blade kind of goes to church like that so in this direction it just kind of cuts like that and that goes through the gearbox just like that as we cruise on around we'll hit all of our grease points there's a grease point right here we've hit all these grease points already want to make sure our tires aren't flat we want to make sure that they've got plenty of air and we aired those tires up I'm gonna do a visual inspection here of our rollers and make sure that nothing is hung up in the rollers before we get started and make sure there are no big chunks taken out of these rollers and these rollers are used to crimp the grass so the grass flows right in between these two rollers right here and it crimps it so that it dries faster okay it breaks the stalk of the grass we want to cruise on around here inspect this wheel make sure that there's nothing obviously wrong we've got plenty of air in our tires we have lubrication points this is the hydraulic cylinder that I was telling you about what happens is you raise that cylinder and then we move this bar back and set this pin in and then the machine is able to go boom all the way down to the ground and back up this is the setting for transport and storage and that is the setting for you now in here we have on every single bearing grease fitting so grease fitting grease fitting grease fitting grease fitting and then there's another one inside here and we'll go through right here on this bearing there's another grease fitting let's open this cabinet up so inside this cabinet there are two containers that have oil in them do not overfill them or they will explode there's also a little storage bin right here for extra blades we want to check our hydraulic codes make sure it's got plenty of play plenty of room in there to move because this machine is going to be moving back and forth like that now we have a pin system right here and this pin basically pulls in and out and it ain't gonna pull right now it's kind of funny it's not going to pull right now but I got to pull this pin out rotate the entire machine over to the farthest pinhole right there and that will offset this machine to the tractor in other words I'll show you so the tractor will remain here but this entire machine will be over to the side right here and the reason behind that is because you don't want to run over your hay before you cut it now this John Deere tractor has a high a medium and a low so we're not gonna mow in low gear we're gonna mow in the middle medium gear number one and that'll put us probably it's somewhere around three to four and a half miles an hour no I don't know what I ran over but there is blood here there is blood here I go around on the other side of the tractor and there's all kinds of blood on this wheel I'm not sure when I ran over I saw some rabbits while I was out there but man that's a lot of blood every single wheel even that wheels got blood on it and it's a Freddy Krueger tractor real quickly before we do go something I failed to tell you is this thing while it's going down the road takes up a lane and a half of traffic so if you have to travel on the road a whole lot when you're doing your hey this is not the setup for you okay the 492 is huge it takes up a lane and a half of traffic I will stop traffic when I drive this thing down the road [Music] [Applause] [Music]