Whats stuck under my mower!!

hey folks this is Josh tiny Ridge farmer welcome back to the farm channel we are back in town we're back on the farm here after our long road trip farm stock 2018 they'll be a link somewhere up here if you guys want to go check that whole trip out basically traveling all over the country we drove about 8,000 miles over about 19 to 20 days and what a fun experience it was a good time we had a great time we introduced you guys to some new youtubers and now it's back to the grind so I've been cheating on you I have not been making videos the last couple days because I've just been playing catch-up you can imagine being gone away from your farm for 20 days ish 20 days of no maintenance 20 days of no mowing 20 days of dust in the house just getting busy so I got out on the tractor this morning we hooked up our woods BB 72 brush mower and we've been out bush hogging we call it bush hogging around here but brush cutting or whatever you want to call it I've been out mowing it only took me about I guess three and a half hours to get into some wire I messed up so a guy gave me a bunch of wire this is how it starts a guy gave me a bunch of copper wire and it was old wire that was used for a fence for an electric fence nut man I'll use that for sure to keep the goats in and everything so I put it up in the field in an area where well where the grass wasn't very tall well the grass is very tall now this is the second time I ran up on that piece of wire the first time I thought I'd pulled it all out of the field and it was a big hoop of wire about this big but evidently I didn't get it all out of the field so up underneath the brush cutter or bush hog or mower deck under here I've got wire just a little bit of wire hung up around the blades so I thought I'd take the opportunity to revisit my first video so the first video I ever did on YouTube was with this mower and basically I pulled the blades off and sharpened them and put them back on that was a pretty cool video the first one I ever did and I was very awkward well right now we're going to sharpen the blades while it's in err we've got chalk right here I've had it up in the air about an hour and a half I know my tractor I know it's going to be okay sitting up like this but we do have a little bit of a safety measure in case of sinking I don't think it's going to go down its safety Sam you can get off my back I'm gonna get underneath here we're gonna sharpen I've already sharpened one blade we're going to sharpen the other bush hog blade and talk a little bit about that the transmission portion or gearbox on this has vibrated a loose so the bolts need to be tightened back up on that dude just some general maintenance stuff on this bush hog and then we're going to get back out here we'll throw the drone up in the air and show you what we're doing with mowing so a lot of the land that we have and this is I apologize if I'm rambling but I need to give you a back story on what's going on a lot of the land that we have is newly cleared land and the newly cleared land we've got to give the grass a couple years to establish before we start mowing hay and putting animals on it for pasture so what I'm doing is basically mowing mowing and mowing so I'll mow anywhere from three to five times a year to keep the grass in what I call the teenage stage so grass has several different stages of life and and we'll go into this in more detail in a future video but for simplicity of this video the stages of life for grass are the baby grass when it's short when it's young when its newly starting to grow or early on in the year then it grows very vigorously through the teenage years and the teenage years of the grass is what I'm gonna call the teenage years but they're specific names for this we'll go over it in the future video the teenage years is where the grass is growing more vigorously and it continues to grow more vigorously both the root system and the top of the grass is growing very very fast and that's what we want to do is we want to catch that grass with this mower in the teenage stage okay so how we know our grass is coming out of that teenage stage is when we start seeing seed heads come out so fescue grass out here in North Carolina shoots a seed head up so in other words a stalk will shoot up and it has grass seed on it okay once it gets into that stage it's an adulthood and almost to Grandpa grass so we don't want to mow it at grandpa grass we want to catch it at teenage grass so it continues to vigorously grow if you can catch your grass in the middle stage where it's growing very fast and very vigorously and you mow it at that point you're going to provide more green manure down to your soil and you're gonna stimulate your grasses growth okay so grass likes to grow grass likes to be stimulated contrary to popular belief if you drive over the same spot over and over you're gonna kill the grass but if you drive through your field in one spot and then drive in another spot and then drive in another spot you're actually stimulating the grass and if you take a close look way back from a distance or from the drone you can see your two tracks that you rode through that field or a blossoming green and the rest of it is normal so grass like stimulation that's what we're doing we're mowing to stimulate growth to stimulate root growth for the first couple years of our new grass let's talk about adult grass and grandpa grass this is what I call adult grass and grandpa grass once it starts shooting that seed head up that's adult grass once that seed head gets up it's out it's mature it's released its pollen then the stalk will turn brown and that's grandpa grass when you mow grandpa grass grandpa doesn't come back like teenage grass does so what we want to do is stimulate vigorous growth and that's how you get three and four cuttings a year here in North Carolina four is pushing it but at least three cuttings a year of hay in North Carolina by stimulating your grass by mowing your grass cool hope you learned something there let's get underneath the mower have some fun guys if you like this kind of content pound that like button subscribe to the channel we've just got a whole lot more fun stuff just like this if you have any specific questions ever post them in the comments down below sometimes viewers will answer those questions and if I don't get back to you right away shoot me an email I'll be glad to answer any question you might have ok first thing I want to show you here is what's going on look at that that guy's just loose the whole nut and bolt assembly is turning right there that one's tight that one's loose and the other two on the other side are loose so we got to get underneath down here and get to those so right up underneath here are the bolts that we need to get ahold of okay so we're going to put a wrench on down here and then we'll go up top and tighten and this is the wire that I'm telling you about let's spin this guy around a little bit so that's a piece of that copper wire and this you can see what happened is it got all wound up in here break that guy free so I got all wound up up underneath here so what we'll do is we'll take a pair of vise grips we'll get up underneath here we'll grab the wire and we'll start jerking it out pretty good there's enough play right in here in between here which is where it's all hung up in here there's enough play to get that dude out alright so let's look at our bush hog blade so you can see gouges and wear marks where I've been pounding through rocks and sticks and stuff like that so we've got to address that and I'll show you what we did on the other side here bring it on over there we go alright so right here is the one that we sharpened and basically we don't need a razor-sharp edge it's not sharp sharp but we do need an edge that's going to hold in any flat spot so we need to take out for cutting so that's it this thing spins around underneath here that's how the bush hog works in that centerpiece it's called a stump jumper or rock jumper and it's designed to keep from pounding your shaft up here so in other words it'll hit the rock jumper before it damages the shaft now what we're seeing this shake see how the whole apparatus is shaking right here that's because we're loose it's up here and we've got to take care of that so we've got a few maintenance items I can't tell you how important it is to maintain your equipment like this do your very best to inspect and make sure everything's okay so when I got into that wire I could have kept on lowing and the deck was still mowing no problem but I stopped and raised it up really high to see what the heck was going on because I could feel a slight vibration and you know when you're using the tractor and you're mowing you're doing all this stuff it'll maybe some money if you just pay attention a little bit okay you're gonna have to pay attention to exactly what's going on sights and sounds and even though you've got hearing protection you can still tell those minut little sounds that aren't quite right there we go got one piece of wire out so the wire that's what we're into you can still tell with your hearing protection those minut little sounds and these blades need to articulate like that okay so they still need to be able to articulate and turn that's why I was getting a strong vibration and that's why I stopped you got to use all your senses when you're out mowing and the number one sense you need to use is common sense common sense tells me I need to put gloves on I got pretty good at getting this stuff out last time my mode there you go you got a little not hung up underneath here clamp down there vise grip work that dude out so there's a sweet spot if you got to find to get this stuff out very interesting a little sweet spot last time I had to grab it with the vise grip and then take a hammer or a beater and beat it out it's got a watch as if you pull it the wrong way you're tightening it up and it breaks really easy every day challenge on the farm worst case scenario we would have to I guess worst-case scenario worst-case scenario is we'd have to pull the bush hog blade off the bush hog here I think we're gonna come on out though seems I hope the biggest thing I've ran over with the bush hog here is a pile of chain-link fence like six foot chain link fence ran over a roll of it you know when you're by land or when you mow for somebody else you never know what you're gonna run up on that's the danger in mowing for someone else they don't know what's in their field and it's dangerous it's also dangerous working under this bush hog you can do it yeah yeah Bailey now both blades are articulating like they should this blade here yeah so that's the way they're supposed to do they're supposed to be able to move so if they hit something really hard they can kick back and get out of the way so if it were to get on to a stump or something like that the blades would get tight like this and then when you start the mower back up the blades will spread back out but if you leave them out and swinging this thing tends to swing around and could hit you then what we've got here is a one-inch nut we gonna tighten up turn on the mission up on this thing it's gonna be tough to do by myself without removing this access hatch so I'm gonna go up here and pull that hatch off hey everybody all right let's talk about what you can and you can't see up here I have a extra long breaker bar type articulating wrench and then down here I'll have to find my sweet spot there we go and get it tightened up okay so there we go shouldn't be too awfully hard to put this done half turn I'll get that dude tight let's do one more just for good measure this is an odd angle you need a couple little kids running around here like one lonely farmer helping out nieces and nephews I got to go back up there I'm hard to get a good camera angle on this but just trust me tightening the bolt it's not that exciting nice like that huh last but not least I know I'm using a breaker bar down here to tighten these bolts it's okay don't worry kids it's gonna be fine all this stuff is moving all the time underneath these machines so periodically with your tractor with anything that's taking this amount of abuse and beating you've got to get underneath and you've got to inspect so part of the process of owning and managing land is maintaining that equipment and making sure nuts and bolts aren't loose and flopping around it'll really save you time and money later on down the road so if I hadn't tighten this down it could have damaged the deck right here and I'd have to replace the whole thing or replace the deck this is about a twenty three hundred dollar piece of equipment these are Oakley's by the way safety type glasses I'm gonna go ahead and put a little bit of a sharpen on this bush hog blade and my goal really is to work into the spots that are gouged out really bad it doesn't have to be sharp it cuts it just powers through stuff it doesn't have to be sharp like a razor blade or like a lawnmower blade it just doesn't need to have big knobs in there so whenever it hits a flat spot on the front of the blade right here it doesn't mode that it doesn't cut it so you gotta get it okay so a little science behind sharpening bush hog blades or a lawnmower blades or any type of blade that's spinning like this is that you need to be careful about how much you take off of the blade okay so I can't grind on this blade for ten minutes and then turn around and grind on this blade for two minutes if I do I'm taking a lot more off of one blade than the other and it will cause a vibration and eventually cause what happened here loosening so this thing is about if you have three and a half years old I've got the same original blades on it I've hit a lot of rocks and stumps and sticks I mean I'm talking about rocks like this big great machine BB seventy two Woods BB seventy two totally swear by it if there were a bush hog or brush cutter that I could recommend to someone it would be the woods BB series tough as nails let's see how it holds up in the long run 15 years from now I hope to be using this same mower right here so here's the outside of the mower and here's where the blades come up and whacked here's where I've hit rocks I mean it gets worked it gets used absolutely so this is the slip clutch I'll need to lubricate at this point and this point and check the oil in here and make sure all this stuff is nice and tight it looks good make sure the blade looks good and then pop this little cover back on this is all part of operating this machinery okay you gotta take care of it then take care of you folks it's time for tips and tricks this is a Dewalt grease gun okay so to get the grease into the gun unscrew the entire canister slide it out take this little tab on your grease container open it up get it prepared for insertion also take the bottom off of your grease container throw it in there take your grease container with the metal ring slide it down into the hole just like so now put your grease gun back together nice and easy hopefully there we go screw the groose grease gun back together we just picked up this grease gun by the way we got this out west when we were on our trip out west we found a good deal 169 this thing's like regular 250 bucks we got it at cow ranch stores there'll be a link below to count ranch stores those guys are really nice people very very nice all right so you got this all screwed in tight this little dude right here so before you pull it apart you pulled this guy out and locked him into place it's pretty tough but you pull that guy out lock them into place now unlock and there's a spring in there okay so you really you just want to push that through and there it is cool that's how you worked it to walk grease gun so as usual we're going to lubricate all our Lube points on this guy if I can find the fitting there it is all right we've got all our repairs done we've got the tractor ready to go we agreed everything up with that grease gun and we're ready to start mowing so we've probably got hmm say five more hours of mowing to do today we're basically we're just gonna go around our big field and we'll get you some drone footage of all this stuff but we're gonna go around the big film will go around the field back in here behind the house we'll get it mode back here we'll go around the big field and get prepared because we're gonna start mowing hay tomorrow all right so let's throw the drone up in the air get the tractor out here and get some work done [Music] [Applause]