Fixing the Impossible (No Experience)

Our track loader, our most critical machine, has a tooth that burst out of the track, and this could mean we have to get a new track. A $1,700 fix. I think I have a simple idea that just might buy us some time. Of course, I've got no experience, I've got no manual. We're gonna hit that in a second. First, we got to do some chores. Very excited. We were able to get her piglets out yesterday and weaned. That means she can stop eating us out of the house at home, honey. You're getting fat. Back to the ration. Doesn't see the feed I threw to her. Over here, over here, look! She has an expensive eating habit. Get the auto feed out of here. No more all-you-can-eat buffet, honey. If you let her, she'll eat 13, 15 pounds a day, and she'll get fat and unhealthy and may not even be able to conceive. The next time we want to. Did y'all hear that pig fart? I've never heard that in my life. Did y'all hear that pig fart? Replay it, Austin. Turn it up. The leaf group needs another hay belt and chickens need more water, and I can't get to it. Okay, bring the water down here. And then we're gonna adjust the youth group hay bale, hopefully by fixing this machine today. Okay, all right, that's because I plugged it in. Thankfully it's not frozen because it did get down to 30 last night. Oh, the 3 little pigs have stayed in. That's good, they're getting to work. Let's look at that in a second. Consulted Mark, our mechanic, and then my grading buddy, uh, Andrew, what do we do? Both of them have said you can keep riding it, but I'm like, it's clanking and the track's falling off. That machine has become a critical piece to our farm. As you heard, you know, we're out of hay at the, uh, youth group. We're hay bombing down here, rebuilding soil. It's critical, and they're big round bales. They got to get picked up and carried down here by machine. Hopefully by the end hopefully by the end of the day, because I don't know how we'll get that round bell here. Maybe we'll limp along with it, but I don't want to risk losing a track or tearing something up. How'd you guys do? Did you stir? Huh? They stared here. Sorry, the camera gets shaky. It's because the pigs are nibbling at the end of my tripod here. Favorite spot over here. We can easily seed in that and then rake it over smooth behind them. A little bit of grain left over. I want them to have all they can eat and I want to put it on the ground, so I have to guesstimate how much I think they're going to eat in a day. I'm going to start soaking the feed because if I'm feeding on the ground, I don't want to lose any. And some of this feed is powdery, and if it doesn't get wet, it's powdery and it's going to fall down in there. Yesterday's videos, we moved the pigs out here and talked about the importance of them and how we're using them to build our soil after we lost it in the hurricane. Check that out if you haven't already. Cows building soil hay balm after our hurricane ravaged land. Now the pigs are doing the same thing. You guys are next, you guys are next. And we're gonna take your compost with you. It will be in place and we can spread it out there after they're done turning it into compost. But we gotta move it. We need that track loader. Same thing with you guys. I'm tired of feeding y'all in here. Let's get them out on the hay balm too. But we'll need to take their material, get it composting. We'll need to be able to roll hay out to them. This is the last of it. I got a hay bale. You can see we're gonna be out. We're gonna be out today. And plus, this is, this is kind of a pain to feed this way. Takes forever to feed the trough. And so I just want to put the cheap out there and all we do is unroll this thing. Austin, show that clip yesterday of Josiah rolling off this hay bale. Yeah, wasn't that easy?

Yeah, let's get our truck.

It's $1,700. I could, and we may have to, and we're gonna eventually have to— this is a Band-Aid to get us for a while, but a lot of that is due to wear and tear —and especially wear and tear moving all these rocks back up from the hurricane. That's it. That's all we got left. This is the last scoop. It's been a lot, and we don't really have a budget for that. And oh man, $1,700 is a lot of money. It's worth a try, my harebrained idea. It goes along with— what'd my dad tell me? Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. That's what the old-timers would do. And we've established our food systems, and now we're transitioning into this, uh, self-reliance era where we're learning how to fix our own things. It would feel really good to just know we could fix something like this and save $1,700. I mean, even if we have to spend $100, $200, $1,500, that would be a phenomenal feeling. Just as good as, if not better, than the feeling you get when you buy something brand new. I think there's a similar rush when you save money. that's similar to the rush you get when you buy something new. We have 2 hay bales that need to go out today. We got a lot of work for this thing. Let's do it. Step number 1: assess the situation, the problem. Josiah, will you warm her up? We've got a tooth from this track. It must have gotten jammed out somehow with rocks. Our idea is to bolt this thing through to that. Unless this gets pushed up in there, it's still going to plank and the track itself is getting in the way. I guess let's get it down to the flat. Okay, see, it's bouncing down in there. That's rough. Mark thought it'd be okay if it is, if we just tighten the track. But Joe's done that. It doesn't help and it's coming off. It's causing the track to come off. Okay, tried to drill through this for placing a bolt. Were you able to cut into this? I didn't try. Even if we get it secure right here it's still going to be off balance in the back, so it kind of needs to come back down where it's supposed to be. Let's see if it cuts. If we can't get this to sit flatter, it's gonna always clang on this. And back there— oh, look, when it goes through these teeth, from what I can see, that, that's gonna be not straight, and that could that could cause problems. That could create more problems. We don't want to be so cheap that we tear up other things with our problem. Um, the idea here is to get some of that rubber out of the way so we can sit that tooth flat. It took some impact to rip that tooth out of there. Do you remember what the impact was? No. The idea is this— what is this tool called? I forgot. Oscillating. Oscillating. It allows us to cut straight in Does it say it's for wood and metal? Yeah, and everything else. Okay, you want me to do it? We're gonna just try to cut some of that rubber so that we can get this flat down in there. All right, works better, works better with a camera. Gotten through to some hollow. That means I've cut through the— that means it's hollow. And we cut around as far as I could. It does feel hollow. Didn't have to cut through the track. That's good. That's good. Now how to get the rubber out of there. Maybe from this angle I can get back further. If I get back all the way to there, we should have a piece that maybe we could— how are we going to pull it out? This will lift down, and if we get it completely loose, it ought to be able to tuck out of there. Thankfully the oscillating tool is working. Okay, I'm gonna leave this on you, Josiah. Mom needs me for a second. Oh, you got it! Is there anything preventing it from sitting up at the base of that track now? No, but it needs to go all the way up. Is it not all the way up yet? Compare it to the other ones. Well, look, this is supposed to be all the way. Okay. Oh yeah, see, see? Yeah, these are up here. There's still some— what? Bolting it. Do you think that's enough, or do you think we need to Dremel out some more rubber? That's probably enough. Okay, major obstacle number 1 behind us. I think we can pull it tight enough with our bolt. Obstacle number 2, drilling through this crazy dense metal. We've already wore through 1 drill bit. I hope that was the problem because I can go get some more drill bits. Henry, you don't need to take this stuff. Come on. Oh, okay, you're just taking a few things. Can y'all see that smoke? Holy smokes, literally we got North Carolina fires again. Y'all ready? All right, that's smoky. Let's hope we don't—

maybe—

is there a new fire? We've got to go to town to get some metal drill bits. We had already gotten one. That metal is so hard it soon wore it out. And so I don't know, I'm gonna buy 2 or 3 more. Well, one reason I go here is because I don't think they have toys. When I get out of that— a few moments later— here's my score. They recommended a titanium, so I got all the titanium they had, 2, and then just a regular one just because I want the local hardware store because they're local, but they also don't have toys and they, they don't bug me about it. Lowe's, evil. Putting toys out front. It's no fun to go there anymore. If you can't get a toy at the hardware store, I'll let you play at the playground real quick.

Trapped in?

Yeah. Let's get home and fix this thing and get the animals some hay. We're gonna go back at it. Two titanium drill bits and one other something or another drill bit. You think that'll be enough? Yeah. You say when you did it before it went smooth at first? Yeah. Until it didn't. Yeah. Do you think the tooth got denser or the bit got dull? I think the bit got dull. First let's back it up, get to where the tooth is on the bottom. Just back up 2 inches. That's it. All right, try that titanium bit. It's sitting down in there nice though now. Yeah. Gosh, that's so— cross fingers. Did you think this drill's weak? Maybe. Okay, that is really hard still, I guess. I don't know if we're getting anywhere. I'm gonna try the different brand. Putting my weight on there. I'm not seeing any shard. Try the other style. Try this one. Is there— we don't have enough power in this drill. How's that one working? I don't know. All right, we are not gonna drill through that. I don't, I don't know what it is. We got the hardest drill bit they had. It might be because they have— we, we got rid of that rubber. We don't run over anything. Smoother? Yeah. They said we need to also tighten these tracks. Can you help me do that? So we may have done all we needed to do by getting that rubber. So now the tooth can sit down in there and those metal wheels aren't rolling over that anymore. We're going to tighten these tracks. You're assuring me we don't have to lift up this machine? Yeah. That's a lot of pressure though. This is tight. It's— the slack's up here. Besides, these are kind of tight already. It doesn't matter how tight you want your tracks. I don't think you could use them. You think? Yeah. That's too loose. Oh wow, that one's tighter. You tightened it recently? Oh, okay. It was all the way over here. This— oh, this used to be— this used to be all the way. This is pushing out, and this used to be all the way in there. So that's how much our tracks have worn over time. Well, that's how much— how loose it was. Well, then don't do it anymore. I didn't know he recently tightened that. The other one looks good too, according— you know, I looked some things up online. Shall we see if it works? Cross your fingers. Can you unroll it around this pile? Let's unbreak it down right there. Hey, we didn't even need to drive— drive— have those drill bits. We just needed to cut out that rubber. Worth trying stuff, right? We spread the hay like this, we spread that manure love.

That's unrolling.

All right, cows, continue turning this sand back into soil. They're busy, they're loving it, they're dropping manure piles. Okay, for a minute there I was not so sure we were gonna get that machine back, but obviously you can tell it's very important. I don't know how we've gotten those round bells out there. Yes, yes, yes! $15 a bit. I ended up buying 4 that I didn't need, but, uh, that's, uh, $60. $60. And now we have those drill bits. We avoided the $1,700 and those tracks live to see another day. Next week, let's get our gravity-fed water out here and down so we can start thinking about getting these sheep and these chickens next week down here. And we'll have cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs restoring our land. Ludicrous speed. We're gonna have to go right to ludicrous speed. Ludicrous speed? So we've never gone that fast before.