My neighbor came over to see what I'm doing tilling up my front yard. Well I had a tree taken out last year, and they left me a hell of a crater, 8-10' diameter. Leading up to this crater the whole yard sloped uphill from all directions. And that crater doesn't take into account all the divits left by (I'm guessing) some kind of outriggers as I wasn't home when the tree crew was here. They did grind the stump below ground, hence the crater. But the tree was only about 2' diameter not the 8-10' that the crater is. I'm tired of my mower getting caught and stuck around the edges of the crater. So I dug up about 1/2 of the front yard, just eyeballed approximately where the rise to the edges of the crater started and marked it off with whatever rattle can of paint I grabbed .. I'm guessing the size is about 24'x32' or so.
I did about 1/2 of that with my rear PTO tractor mount tiller, that I pulled out of some guys yard buried to the time shaft while the tractor it was connected to was buried to the axles in dirt. I have no idea how long it had sat before I got it. I'd only used that tiller a few times before I tried to do this job with it and that was a couple of years ago, as well. So it has done aLOT of sitting in the elements over the years. At about the halfway point of this till job, the secondary chain busted a link but once I got it apart to verify what broke I noticed alot of pitting among the other links, probably a combination of no lube(I didn't help that situation as I didn't know there was a lube point TO lube that chain, i found it by default as I tore it down a couple of weeks ago when it first broke.
I went to CL and bought a Horse for what I thought was fair (compared to others of the same model that were listed at the time) but I got it home, put it right in the dirt and it had like NO power. I found an exact twin to the original engine by luck, and quite cheaply to boot that neither me or the seller knew whether it ran.
A new set of points and condenser, plus the starter and carb from the original and it started easy and ran decent. Even if it did double as a mosquito fogger.
Well yesterday I ran that tiller about 3 hours and today I ran it about 11 hours (solid!) and finally done. This includes re tilling the ground I did 2 weeks ago. I tilled it parallel to the driveway first, as I'd started with the tractor tiller, starting where the big one busted. Then I went crossways and re tiller the whole thing again.
I can't tell you how many times I killed it, how many times I launched it, how many times I held on for dear life while it danced on a root til it got past it. I mean a few times my feet were completely sunk in the previous tilled soil as it pulled me and I hung onto the handles to keep it from launching.... At which time I'd back up to just before it launched and dig in and HANG ON..
The old ads showing someone walking along one of these barely hanging on with one hand definitely had to have been staged at best, or at least re tilling previously broken ground. No sod busting, no rocks, no roots. The tree was about in the center of that area, and the swipe about 2 tiller widths from the edge on the side in the pic and 2 tiller widths from the near side had to have been the worst for launching and catching on roots. There was a couple spots dead in the middle (probably caught on the stump remnants) that also gave me fits.
The weird part was that where the tractor tiller broke was probably the least root infested part of the job, about inline with where I m at in the pic but closer to the sidewalk end... Well after I had already been thru the worst of the roots, like a couple of tiller widths away...
I've about got it raked out, it got dark on me. Hopefully I can finish that rake out tomorrow after work before it crusts again,(supposed to rain Tues) and seed ..... I had another neighbor ask what I was planting/ growing..... I think I confused him with my answer... Kentucky bluegrass, fescue and maybe a little bit of ryegrass
