There are 59 wild geese in this picture; they flew over my domicile due south this morning. I only snapped the picture with my phone; they move fast, and there wasn’t enough time to get my proper camera.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
As far as I can tell, they really were heading dead southwards, not just approximately. I have a weather station, and I measured the orientation of my property several times. I know the north-south axis is slightly offset from my hedge. And subjectively, the path these followed was offset from my hedge at the same angle.
What do wild geese have to do with the title? Wild geese heading south mean autumn is here. And that means tilling the ground. In my garden, no till means usually no harvest. The soil is heavy clay, prone to self-compaction. Even local plants and grasses can struggle.
To help with the process of tilling the soil, I bought a small single-axis tractor ten years ago. Of all the labor-saving devices I’ve ever bought, this is the most controversial one – it cost me over 3,000 €, and it surely hasn’t saved me that much work yet. Mainly, because I am hesitant to use it. It sometimes has trouble starting after prolonged periods of non-use, which is frustrating. This year was no different; in fact, I could not start it at all for over a week.
I am not Otto McNick by any definition, so I was at a complete loss about what to do. The company that sold it to me and used to help in the past when the problem occurred no longer exists, and I could not find any service nearby. And I cannot take the device to a service further off, as it is too big. I contacted a lawn-mower service in a nearby town, but I got no reply. So I had no other option than to start studying the manual for the motor. I found nothing about the problem, except how to change the spark plug. So I did that.
It did not help; the machine still did not start. Then I remembered that the service mechanic said something about water condensate in the carburetor the last time this happened, so I started to search the internet about how to clean the carburetor. I found a short video, I watched it, and today in the morning, I crossed my fingers, then uncrossed them, and started disassembling the carburetor. I wiped the insides with a clean, dry paper towel, I blew every hole through with dry air, and I completely changed the fuel in the tank. Then I assembled everything back, hoping against hope that it worked – and voila, the machine started on the first pull of the cord!
If you haven’t had this experience, I cannot describe to you how good that feels. If you had, you know.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The tractor is not powerful enough to till established grass turf. That is why I planted my potatoes on top of the turf and covered them with soil and moss – to kill the grass, in the hopes that dead grass roots will be easier to till. It worked as expected, except I made one mistake – I left uncovered strips between the three potato patches, where the grass survived. Those did cause me some problems, I will know better next time – I will cover such walkpaths either with cardboard or with black cloth.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
An acre is allegedly the amount of land that a man with a plough and a team of oxen can till in a day. It took me almost two hours to till these approximately 25 square meters, so I am woefully inadequate. Reasons for that are several – my tractor is nowhere near as powerful as a team of oxen, this was the first time the ground was being tilled in probably over a century, so I had to go over it three times in different directions, and it is small, thus I lost a lot of time turning around. One of the reasons why old-school farming was done on strips of land, not squares of land, was that once the oxen (tractor) were on a line, they could follow it for a reasonably long time.
History lesson aside, I will have to till my main patch too, I only wait to see if I get some late peas or not. Once the answer to that question is clear, I will start the machine again. Unfortunately, I know already that I won’t have spinach – the second crop either did not grow or bolted too, just like the first one. I probably have to add spinach to the list of crops that don’t do well here.
And lastly, a bit about the time and labor saving.
I hope this means I will be able to get consistent output out of this device in the future. Ploughing a garden patch with this tractor is no less laborious than tilling it with a spade, but it is about ten times quicker. I can do in a few hours work that would otherwise take me several days. If I can now start the device whenever I need it, I might finally get my money’s worth out of it.
While condensation in the carburetor could have been the problem, it could very well have been old petrol.
If left for a long period of time I’ve heard that petrol loses some volatility but also will develop compounds which will, when burned, start to foul the engine (mainly the spark-plugs). I’ve personally never had a problem with this, but I don’t think we go more than about 4 months between starting any of the engines we have. But I have listened to coworkers complain about old fuel clogging up their plugs and valves.
Many people around here drain most of the petrol out of the tanks of their lawn equipment at the end of each mowing season. I’d be worried about letting it dry out completely, but emptying most of it out probably isn’t a bad idea if the engine is going to sit for a year.
Of course, it sounds like getting any condensation out of the carburetor isn’t hard, and it certainly will not hurt. So while it may only be old petrol causing the issues, I’d keep cleaning the carburetor (and maybe the plug) every year too.
One of the places I’ve worked at had a lot of gasoline-powered equipment (generators, tools, etc.) that got used pretty intermittently, and often had starting problems. I think they’ve started assigning it to one of their student workers to go around at the beginning of the month, and start each one up and let it run for a couple minutes.
When I was enlisted, and we went overseas, we put some additive in the tanks of our vehicles that was supposed to help prevent the gasoline from “going bad” (whatever that meant). I don’t really know what is actually happening to the gas, and no idea what was in the additive, but it was highly recommended by all the people who seemed to know a bit about cars/engines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
but, congrats on fixing the engine.
@flex, I was informed about the fouling problem by the seller of the device before he retired, and I was using the additive meant to prevent it (made by the motor manufacturer) ever since, for both the tractor and the lawnmower. Both have motors made by the same manufacturer (who also provides the additive), using the same carburetor, yet only the tractor has the starting problem.
Getting condensation out of the carburetor is a matter of loosening one screw, removing a small bowl, and cleaning it. Now that I have done it, I should be able to do it in minutes if I need to. I am now a bit more optimistic about my investment.
@lochaber, I was thinking about starting the device periodically, but I kept forgetting, and the longer I did not do it, the bigger the dread of “what shall I do if it doesn’t start” grew, until I ignored it.
Regarding the additive and fuel spoiling, I am a chemist (albeit rusty on my knowledge), and I too do not know what can go wrong with petrol. The only thing that I can think of is that the added ethanol absorbs air humidity and separates from the mix if everything is not perfectly airtight or if moist air gets into a not completely full tank. This spring, I only had a tiny amount of fuel in the tank before I put it back in the storage, and that might actually be a bigger problem than having it completely full. I do not know.
In Finnish, that V-shaped travel formation that some birds use is called a “plough”. And migrating geese can damage forage crops when they stop to feed on fields in their hundreds or even thousands. I often see this on the local fields during the autumn migration.
BTW, it looks and sounds magnificent when a thousand geese take flight in front of you and go over your head as one flock. They don’t usually mind people gawking at them nearby, but sometimes some not-very-obvious threat causes them to take flight. Then they all get up, fly a couple times round the field and settle back to where they were feeding.
In the UK you are also warned to drain the tanks of mowers and strimmers for overwinter storage, we never have drained our strimmer, but it lives indoors on hooks on the wall of our dirty work room, which is heated. We don’t have problems starting it as long as the person doing so has enough oomph in the pulling arm, it may be that it just never gets cold enough to cause problems or that the problems of petrol degradation are mythical or that people have other problems they have attributed to ‘bad’ petrol.
Anyway I hope you now have the answer and you can get your tractor to start easily in the future.
@lumipuna, that is a cool coincidence, since the only Finnish word I know is puukko, and I would probably pronounce it incorrectly.
I have never seen geese feeding on fields in huge numbers; they usually do not do that here, they only fly overhead. I actually heard them before I saw them. Sometimes I even hear them after dark.
@Jazzlet, I never removed petrol from the lawnmower before winter storage -- there is not a word about doing it in the manual, for either of my petrol-powered devices. So I now checked the site of the motor manufacturer (something I should have done long ago) -click-
Quote:
Thus, it seems that the mistake I did this spring was to store the machine with an almost, but not entirely, empty tank.
The first year, I did not use the fuel stabilizer, and at that time the note at the end applied:
Nothing beats slightly contradictory information.
I wonder if it would be easier to get a plow-trained-animal.
Donkey are really cute.
/just kidding
@chigau, completely seriously: A relationship with a domesticated animal has its rewards, but for work, I will prefer a difficult and occasionally misbehaving machinery over an obstreperous, boneheaded beast that needs to be fed and housed all year round every day.
Exchanging beasts of burden for motors had a significant impact on our culture. The most significant change was that motors are more reliable and exponentially more efficient.