Well, it started off as a desire to grow some pumpkins.
With all of the pandemic issues that are swirling around, it has been taking its toll on the local community events that usually occur around my local area.
One significant event (at least to me) is the local agricultural fair that is usually held this time of year. For obvious reasons, the fair is canceled this year, but to at least keep the spirit of the fair alive, the local agricultural society decided to hold a series of virtual events.
One of those events was a competition to grow the largest pumpkin. That was something that definitely intrigued me, so I signed up, collected a few pumpkin seeds, and started growing my large pumpkin.
While it's fun to grow large gourds, the vines do take up a great deal of space in the garden. This requires a lot of tilling around the plants to keep the weeds at bay. Cultivating by hand is a bit of a chore and to be frank, I don't consider it one of my favorite things to do.
Due to the larger than normal space that I needed to keep tilled, I figured that making some sort of tow behind a cultivator that I could pull with a small tractor would be a nice project while I was waiting for the plants to grow.
Initially, I figured that I could use my lawn tractor to pull my cultivator, but after doing some digging I realized that this would be a terrible and potentially expensive mistake. Your typical lawn tractor is designed to do only one thing, cut grass. Because of this, it is only structurally strong enough to carry the weight of the operator and itself. Likewise, the transmission of a typical lawn tractor is fairly lightly built, again since it's only designed to drive around on a lawn.
If I was to use my lawn tractor to pull an implement that is dragging on the ground, I would quickly discover that I either that I had a tractor that was in two pieces or that I had a transmission that had given up the ghost - both not good outcomes.
What I needed was something that was classed as a garden tractor. While they tended to look like any other lawn tractor, they had more beefed-up frames, differentials, and transmissions. They also tended to be a bit bigger and had more powerful engines and larger tires than your typical lawn tractor.
Of course, they are a lot more expensive than your typical lawn tractor, so buying a new or even a gently used tractor was going to be a very expensive proposition.
Looking around at the various online ads in my area for anything closer to my price range revealed tractors that were charitably referred to as restoration projects, or more commonly as "for parts only".
While I certainly wasn't going to find anything ready to go on the cheap, I was starting to warm up to the idea of perhaps trying my hand at bringing an old tractor back to life. It certainly would be a good way to learn more about small engine repair, and if I really mess it up, I could at least get some of my money back by selling the tractor for scrap metal.
And so, it was at a local auction that I spied my project tractor.
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