My weekend started early with a spur-of-the-moment equipment rental. Our house sits on a little over three acres, and when we purchased it in 2019 the back half of the property had been growing up for quite some time. Immediately we knew that we wanted to be able to use the entire yard for our dogs and gardening and landscaping projects. One of the first things we did after moving in was hire someone to bush hog the grown up area. Unfortunately part of the flora included the terribly nasty invasive Callery pear, whose most infamous cultivar is the ‘Bradford’ pear. These trees suck. Seriously, if you have on in your yard cut it down and plant something else. Almost anything else is better.
Anyway, there was a very large Callery pear on the property and it had mothered dozens of smaller trees in the vicinity, most of which had 2-4” trunks. Last summer we rented a mini excavator and dug out every last one of these invasive pests and stacked them up in three large piles to dry out enough to burn.
Yardwork is hard work
This summer’s major backyard project was burning those brush piles. After much back and forth with a few different rental companies, I had a problem with no easy solution. The major equipment rental business we used for the mini excavator has a $200 delivery fee which I’d like to avoid. Although I have a trailer, it’s only has a single 3500lb axle and would’t be suitable for transporting a small tractor. The major equipment renter doesn’t rent trailers with their equipment, so it’s BYOT or pay the delivery fee. The local Kubota dealership has trailers, but doesn’t rent tractors with loaders. My third option was to rent from Home Depot, who rents tractors with loaders on trailers, but who doesn’t accept reservations so its first come first served only. Not exactly ideal for a project that necessitates planning ahead due to weather restrictions like rain and wind.
In the end I drove to Home Depot which had two machines to choose from… a Kubota B26 TLB (tractor-loader-backhoe) and some kind of Yanmar with a backhoe attachment. I wasn’t exactly sure of the model of the Yanmar since it was covered in a plethora of safety warnings and rental warnings and big orange box hardware store decals, but I am pretty sure it was an SA324.
My preference would have been for the slightly larger Kubota, but its trailer had a 2 5/16″ hitch and my truck only had a 2” ball. I didn’t have the tools with me change out the trailer hitch ball and I didn’t want to buy cheap hitch just for this one project, so I pouted a little and went with the Yanmar lest I lose time and motivation to a game of musical hitches.
The project was pretty straightforward… I needed to tidy up the brush piles before setting them on fire and I also needed to dig up three remaining stumps and burn them as well. To my surprise the reverse on the Yanmar’s hydrostatic transmission was extremely slow which wasn’t great for pushing tree limbs into a fire, and the backhoe attachment had some pretty extreme flex against the frame of the tractor when digging out the tree roots. I’ve heard horror stories about three point hitch backhoe attachments being prone to breaking free from the tractor under load, but I did not confirm that this was one of those setups because I was on a time crunch. My limited time with the little Yanmar is the reason why there aren’t as many pictures of this project as I had planned.
Another disappointment with the rental tractor was that it had clearly been abused during its service life. The front bucket was damaged, the plastic hood was cracked in several places and held together with at least a dozen zip ties. The seat had seen better days and was incredibly wobbly and seatbelt latch was missing. Shockingly, the amber turn signals/emergency flashers on the rear of the tractor were completely broken off with only the clear incandescent bulbs atop the mounting bracket surrounded by the sharp plastic remains of the lens housing which I cut my hand on almost immediately after arriving home with it.
This was my first time renting from Home Depot, so I didn’t really know what to expect but I would assume that their equipment probably isn’t as well maintained as that from a major rental company. Or maybe I just got ahold of a used and abused example.
I returned the battle worn baby Yanmar to the orange store with just over two hours to spare. Although the formerly overgrown portion of my back yard still has a long way to go, it is now much improved thanks to the help of the tiny little backhoe.
Later in the weekend
The automotive highlight of my weekend was attending the local cruise-in at the mall in my town. My favorite vehicles in attendance this week was a GM square body dually on Alcoas, a 1965 Pontiac Bonneville in an amazing shade of gold (I wasn’t able to grab any decent pics of it) and an absolutely stunning red 1957 Ford Thunderbird with a white hard top. Fortunately this example was not fitted with a Continental kit for the spare tire. My apologies to anyone who loves them. This was probably my favorite car of the cruise-in.
Also in attendance were some lovely Corvettes, a few Mustangs from across the nameplate’s many generations, a Toyota Celica convertible, and a delightfully restored VW Beetle convertible with gorgeous plain upholstery.
I was able to speak to a few different folks attending who gave me information about other weekend cruise-ins in the area and I will hopefully get a chance to visit them soon.
It's a bird, it's a plane
The only other interesting machines-as-entertainment thing I did over the weekend was spot a C-130 fly by close to my house. I get to see some interesting aircraft since I live about 10 miles from BNA, but this is the first time in two years I’ve lived here that I have seen a C-130. And since it was a C-130 I heard the characteristic drone of the turboprops before I ever saw the plane. My flight tracking app identified it as Reg. 93-1036, but since I’m not really an aviation buff that’s just about all I can tell you.
That was my weekend. How was yours?
