It seems like I’m always working a pick and a shovel at Tinfiny Ranch. Situated at 6000 feet in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains the place is steep with many elevation changes. An arroyo runs past the house so that when it rains (and it rains a lot in New Mexico) my driveway becomes a short-lived trout stream.
Water, being the universal solvent, plays havoc with Tinfiny Ranch and most of my time is spent trying to bend it to my will. Armed with hand tools and 50-pound bags of concrete I’ve managed to carve out a dry spot to sleep. The landforms here are fleeting, changing and slowly make their way 1500 feet down to the Tularosa Valley where huge dust storms blow the accumulated material back up onto the mountain sides. You don’t own real estate here: you trap it.
When Hunter called me to tell me he had found a Kubota tractor for me my first thoughts were about water. Like a slightly soft football a front loader tractor would give me a leg up on erosion. I was on my way to Stillwater a few days later.
Hunter is my riding buddy. We both like crappy old two-strokes and we’ve run them clear across country following the Trans-America Trail. We’ve passed some impassable routes and had bikes lay down on us in the middle of the desert. I know him as Vinnie The Snake from the dirt and only the dirt but it turns out there’s more to Hunter than a beat up old DT400 Yamaha.
We had a day to kill before I picked up the tractor so we went to Hunter’s Skybox at OSU and watched the OSU women’s basketball team dismantle a team from Kansas. The governor of Oklahoma has a suite two doors down and there was unlimited free food along with all the ice cream you could eat. The suite had a commanding view of both the football field and the indoor arena.
When we walked in the coach shook Hunter’s hand and then he shook my hand like I might also be somebody important. Then the TV and radio guys chatted up Hunter including me in the conversation. It was weird: nobody ever cares about what I have to say but my proximity to Hunter earned a listen. Everyone knew and loved Hunter and they loved me too. Nobody called him The Snake. It’s like there are two Hunters, one that lives in a world unlike any I’ve seen. I’ll remember that other, respectable Hunter when he’s tipped over in a mud hole cussing his two stroke.
The Tractor was a beauty with tires so new they still had rubber bar codes visible. Kubota’s have earned a good name in the heavy equipment arena and this L2850 sported a diesel engine that fired right up.
Underneath the driven front end you’ll find a portal-type axle to give the tractor plenty of ground clearance. Everything is leaking a bit but oil is cheap and Tinfiny can use a little dust control. The steering felt tight and Woody, the guy I bought the tractor from takes good care of his stuff.
When I worked construction in Miami it was rare to see a dashboard unbroken. Vandalism was a constant problem. Lights, tires and hoses were routinely damaged by bored kids. The L580 dash was clean and everything works except the tach needle fell off.
At the rear of the Kubota has a two-speed PTO drive that I will be using as soon as CT buys me a backhoe attachment. Amazon has some cool 3-point hoes costing around $3600. You don’t want to do a lot of side digging with a 3-point hoe because the hitch wasn’t meant for big side loads but as long as you are crabbing in a straight line they will work well.
The transmission has high and low range with low range, first gear being super slow. Top end of the tractor in high range-high gear is around 12 miles per hour. With zero suspension 12 MPH is plenty over Tinfiny’s rough grounds.
This lever engages the front wheels. This is pretty important because the front end loader combined with nothing attached to the hitch means the big rear wheels have little traction.
The Kubota’s grille was bent a bit but Woody had a new grille that he hadn’t gotten around to installing. The rest of the tractor is pretty straight. The side lights need new lenses and the back lights could use some love but all in all I’m thrilled with the tractor. How could I not be? Every boy loves a tractor.
One of my moto buddies stopped by Tinfiny Ranch, our high desert lair in New Mexico, and in the course of showing him around the property we got to talking about how incomplete everything was. He called it the 70% rule. As in 70% is close enough and time to move on to another project.
I’d like to have a concrete floor in Tinfiny’s shed. I’ve been working on it. Sadly, only around 25% of the floor is concrete leaving 75% (AKA the lion’s share) dirt. It’s a solid sort of dirt though, and not much water runs under the building’s edge when it rains, unless it rains really hard. Then it gets a bit muddy. It would have been a heck of a lot easier to pour the slab first, then put the building up but that ship has sailed.
I’ve nearly finished the water system. There’s a 2500-gallon tank being fed rainwater from half of the shed roof. I plan to gutter the other half some day but first I have to finish those 24-volt circuits to get the pressure pump working. I know the pump works ok because I’ve rigged it up to an 18-volt Ryobi battery. It’s just temporary, you know? There’s a pesky leak on one of the Big Blue filters. I’ve taken the canister apart several times but it still leaks from the large o-ring recessed into the canister. I leave the Ryobi battery out of the jury-rigged power connector when I don’t need water. That slows the leak quite a bit.
When you are off-grid you need a generator as backup in case a series of cloudy days runs the battery-bank down. Of course, the generator needs its own well-ventilated, soundproofed shed to keep the generator out of the elements and not drive everyone within a 4 square mile area crazy. I have almost finished the generator shed. I’ve got the floor poured, the wiring to the solar-generator transfer switch installed and complete but for some reason the wheels came off and the project stalled.
Lately I’ve been tinkering with an 
