GUESS WHAT GOT HUNG UNDER THE TRACTOR!! "PREP TALK" FOR MOWING SEASON!

hey folks its Josh turning rich farmer welcome to the farm vlog today mowing season is here whether we like it or not it's mowing season so today's vlog we're going to take you around the tractor we're going to show you a little bit about the tractor take you through what we do before we go mowing and ask you if you have any input if you have any suggestions so come along today we'll show you what it takes to get started mowing here on the farm the processes that we go through the maintenance that we go through to ensure that our equipment lasts and doesn't break down let's go have some foot [Applause] [Music] so folks for the sake of this video I'm using these nitrile gloves just so that when I get on the tractor I'm not covered in grease when you do this you tend to get grease kind of all over your hands and all over everywhere there's almost no way to do this without getting grease somewhere so any interest of handling a camera and showing you I'm gonna wear gloves so the first thing we want to address here is the tractor we're using a John Deere 50 65 tractor it's 63 horsepower I believe to the PTO which is plenty for this BB 72 it's a woods BB 70 tube brush cutter and that's a very heavy-duty brush cutter it can cut stuff up to about that big okay so it's really kind of overkill for what we're doing now but from when we bought the farm it wasn't over killed there were sticks and limbs and trees growing up all through our fields that were huge that we're like this big even up to as big as your wrist this thing will handle it okay so it's a heavy heavy duty brush cutter what we're going to do with the tractor here is we're going to go through we're going to check the oil and we know we just changed the oil so it should be good but every time before you fire your tractor up should check the oil and then we've got some lubrication points on this loader right here we haven't lubricated it yet this year so we're going to go ahead and go through there and lubricate it really good and basically put two shots of grease in each grease fitting pretty simple now there are several schools of thought on this how many squirts to put in there I just put either two or three squirts and it depends on how big the articulating spot is that I'm putting the grease in so let's get busy lubricating this thing check the oil and then we'll take you around to the back of the tractor and show you what we have to do in order to lubricate the brush cutter or bush hog or mowing deck or whatever you want to call it we call it a bush hog around here that's just kind of the slang term I know bush hog is a brand but we call that a bush hog or a brush cutter or a mowing deck alright so in this 5065 right here on the right-hand side is our dipstick and man that oil looks good now what I've always been taught is you could start the tractor and then you've got to pull out the dipstick wipe it off stick it back in and check the oil or if the tractors sitting stationary over night you can just pull out the dipstick look at it it should be just slightly over full because there's no oil circulating through engine guys tractor guys mechanic guys post me and comment down there let me know if I'm right okay and now for my tractor disclaimer I don't claim to be a tractor expert I don't claim to be a farm expert I don't claim to be a mechanical expert I'm a dude using this tractor to mow his fields if you have any knowledge you'd like to share with us please share it with us we'd all like to know and what we don't want to hear is condescending ridiculous comments about how smart you are about your tractor because if you're really smart you'd share the knowledge and you wouldn't be condescending all right now I'm not going to take you through and show you squirting grease in each grease fitting it just doesn't make any sense I will take you through and show you one grease fitting and how we do it on the front and then I'll take you and show you one on the back and how we do it there are basically a couple knuckles on the back that articulate and those are the ones we're gonna have to put grease in now here on the loader itself there are grease points in basically every moving area so there's a grease point here there's a grease point here there's grease point back here there's a grease point here and on the grapple that's what we have that's what this critter right here is called on the front and it's basically a big grabber and KFOR push and brush up and I like to put that on the tractor because I know I've got a tree down so while I'm mowing if I run into a place where a tree is down I can just push that tree back up into the woods so it's got several lubrication points and really very simple I think there's one there one there just very very simple stuff so let me show you how we grease one grease fitting real quick so this is a grease gun that I use pretty simple not too bad in a future vlog I'll show you how to load a grease gun I tell you what that was a big challenge for me when I first started working on the farm here now I have a rag and basically what I'll do is I'll take my rag and I'll wipe out my grease fittings and I'll make sure the end of this grease gun is nice and clean okay really maintenance wise on this you probably only have to lubricate it twice a year for the amount that I use it but you know it depends if it starts squeaking you definitely are running dry on oil and you need to put some oil in there so this is a grease fitting right here and you can see right in the tip there's a little ball basically what I'd call a check valve right inside there and that keeps the grease fitting from spewing grease right back out so simply enough we just take our fitting we pop it on the end there and we'll just pump a couple couple squirts of grease in there one two that's it so we're just going to go around the tractor hit all the grease fittings and there's one grease fitting that I always forget I always mess up go underneath the tractor and it's where the axle articulates in the front so I'll go under there and I'll get that one first so I don't forget it and I don't miss it because that's a very crucial lubrication point so we'll get that done will lubricate everything upfront and then we'll take you in the back we'll talk to you about the brush cutter we've actually got to start the tractor and raise it up so that we can get to all our lubrication points now there are other items of maintenance that you need to check you need to check your air filter you need to check your grill your front grill and make sure everything's dust free and not clogged up so your tractor doesn't overheat there's also the hydraulic fluid we can check the level on the hydraulic fluid and there's also reservoirs in the axle that need to be checked too now we checked all this stuff when we serviced the tractor before so we don't need to check it because we just serviced at about a week ago maybe two weeks ago now we need to address all this because grease and oil and air filters and air flow are the lifeblood of your tractor and it can last for 50 years or it can last for 50 hours it's up to you you've got to take care of your tractor let's get back here to the back and I'll show you the brush cutter before we get started on the brush cutter I want to show you two things that I use on my tractor that are different than other people one of them is in my hand this is called the miracle bamboo pillow and I ain't trying to sell it to you but I am trying to tell you that if your back hurts when you're sitting on a tractor or sitting for a long period of time I don't care if it's your office or anywhere this works okay I don't know how it works but for some reason it takes you see that weird gap right there it takes the pressure off your spine and makes your back not hurt now when you're sitting on a tractor for 10 hours your back is going to hurt this takes the pain away it works and I have one of my office chair too basically I just set this boom right there can I just sit on it pretty simple and the other thing I have is this cell phone mount and I use this on the tractor pretty much all the time so you got to keep your phone with you for safety sake and you need to know if you're getting a call or something important is going on so I take my phone and I stick it in this mount very very simple inexpensive mount that I use on the tractor and I'll get you a close-up here I use it on my tractor using on my gaiter I use it on my trucks the same mount and everything and it works great let me show you so it's pretty much Universal and it has one heck of a suction cup on there and sits just like that right there and it hold your phone nice and tightly so it doesn't go anywhere it's okay if it bounces no biggie gotta keep your phone on you if you want to be safe okay safety safety safety safety now let's get to the lubrication points on the brush cutter so the first thing I want to do is get up underneath here and I want to inspect my blades and make sure everything looks right and they're neat there make sure nothing looks all crazy or loose anything like that or if there's any metal hanging down like that I want to take care of that real quick okay next lubrication point I want to hit is the wheel so there is a articulating area right here that has a grease fitting there's one in the wheel there are several in this knuckle and several in this knuckle and what you don't see underneath here are two joints I call them constant velocity joints or CV joints right in here that move all the time I also like to make sure that I'm well lubricated on my arms here and I like to put a little shot of grease right here and a little shot of grease right here too now the next thing we want to check is our gearbox or transmission I'd call it just a gearbox right here is a filler neck and right here is a boat that you unscrew to drain or suction out okay so what you want to do is fill this guy up until it drips out of that and that's it and I think I use 8090 weight oil on that now you may want to consult your owners manual in your particular model to see what kind of oil or grease you need to put in the gearbox okay now folks I hope you've learned a little bit in this quick video on how I get the tractor ready to start mowing so we're gonna get out there and start mowing one thing of note every six hours I have to go through and lubricate all the lubrication points on the brush cutter and inspect it and make sure everything's okay I got to keep my ears peeled for any kind of strange sounds or anything like that you have to use all your senses when you're mowing with the tractor and make sure you don't mess something up sometimes you could be listening and looking and paying attention and still something wrong goes on let me take you over here and show you what we did whoops so I was just mowing along having a good old time and boom I ran up on this wire let me get you down closer so you can see it so this is a roll of copper wire and you can see right there that's where the bush hawk got it and it was just slinging that copper all over the place so we had to stop really quickly I knew it was there I was looking for it I actually had my eyes on it but it caught one little piece of wire and sucked that big chunk all the way up in there and the good thing about this brush cutter is and has a built-in clutch so as soon as it sucked it in that clutch started slipping and it didn't destroy my brush cutter which was awesome and I had to raise it back up get up underneath here get some snips cut it out pull it out it was all tangled up but we got it out so that's a good thing we didn't hurt anything and we learned a little bit of a lesson keep your eyes peeled no matter what you do sometimes you're still gonna hit stuff guys please don't forget click that like button subscribe to the channel if you're not already subscribed click the little bell down there and I'll notify you when I post a new video and we're gonna get busy mowing thanks a lot we'll see you next time on Stoney Ridge farmer you [Music]