He's been on vacation--or maybe he retired and forgot to tell us--for a year. We tried all kinds of methods to resuscitate him to no avail. New spark plugs, new coil, new points, new battery, on and on. But the spark was--literally--gone.
He was pretty much on last legs anyway. The ring in the #3 piston was broken so he sounded like one of those old hit-and-miss engines, but he ran like that for a long time. Brush-hogging, plowing and cultivating gardens, grading the driveway, pulling logs, old Massey did it all.
So today he rode away on someone else's horsepower. And in his place, we said hello to the NEW old tractor: another Massey Ferguson, but this one is a 245 and it's diesel which thrills Larry but leaves me underwhelmed.
Maybe I should wait to pass judgment? But I was beyond ready to trade one set of problems for another--at least these will be new problems.
Larry is as happy as a man can be with his brand new Husqvarna mower (bought with ebay and booth money, yay!). He's got a very real appreciation, finally, of what this buying and selling is doing for us. It's paid for trips and tires and car repairs and house repairs and all kinds of other things, but until that shiny orange mower showed up I don't think he really understood that all this work is paying off.
Now we have a new mower, a new-to-us tractor, and I have a happy hubby who is a lot more willing to do the lugging and hauling and repairs to all this stuff I drag in. Win-win, I call it.
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Another great way to make all the hard work real. Love the red tractor. The old one was such a classic that looked like one the uncles and my Dad used on their family ranch way back when.
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Your old tractor looks superficially very like the Massey Ferguson I used to drive on the farm, though I can see it's not quite the same. We had an even older one that was always known as "Ted's tractor" which, despite being used daily and getting minimal maintenance, was still going strong when I left the farm.
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