The Breakroom > The Water Cooler

Let the Ditching Commence !

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awemawson:
Time to get ready for dredging the pond. The Coots or Moorhens or whatever they were don't seem to be still around so lets get on with it.

The north side of the pond was surrounded by three side of a fence, originally intended to give a bit of a haven for wild life, but inevitably had got overgrown with rushes and was very hard to manage. My intention was to take my Camon C8 fingerbar mower down there, cut the rushes and put them up in stooks to dry so when I dredge I wasn't dumping the spoil on very long vegetation.

That plan soon stalled. This mower was abandoned by our predecessors 15 years ago with a stuck clutch, which I successfully fixed and it's been excellent, it has a finger bar and a cultivator head. It's sat for two years but started right up and went to work, but got hopelessly stuck by the hummocks that the rushes form.

OK Plan B: dispose of the three sided fence and cut it with the full size flail mower. So the JCB came out to play, and with a friend acting 'banksman' we went round pulling up the chestnut posts with strops and carted them off to the bonfire.

Much of this fence was going to have to go anyway to make room for dredging, and quite a bit was in poor condition though it's only about 13 years old.

Next job - couple up the big mower and mow it - this will probably take a few passes. It's been suggested that I might be better scraping the top off and losing the vegetation - not sure yet I'll sleep on it.

(The mower picture is of one on eBay not mine which isn't as shiny








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pycoed:
I'm surprised your little Camon wouldn't handle those rushes. They have quite a good name. I  have an Allen Mayfield 8 (like an Allen Scythe's much larger brother - 8hp Kohler & hydrostatic gears ) which would eat that little patch. Tussocks are the big problem with rushes though: it's REALLY hard work cutting them by "hand mower". Much more sensible to break out the Turner!
I had to do a roller bearing on my Turbomower the other day &, looking up the PDF manual for the size confidently ordered a 1 1/4" job only to find that between printing the manual/parts list, & building the thing, they had gone metric :bang: Had to return it for a 35mm version! I'm not entirely happy with the other side bearing so am awaiting another before resuming the annual rush battle.

awemawson:
The Camon was quite happy cutting the rushes, what stumped it was the great clumps of basically clay that have formed at their base. The lumps were too much for the wheels to make progress and in the end it got totally stuck and I was unable to move it backwards or forwards - rather like a WW2 invading tank getting stuck on 'dragons teeth defences  :lol:

It took three of us heaving on attached strops to shift it.

This morning i did a tentative scraping with the big JCB. I could either dig in and drag out very substantial root balls and make a big mess, or skid over the top and make little impression. I tried both the 6 in 1 front bucket in planing mode with the jaw wide open, and with the 5 foot toothless ditching bucket on the back actor to little avail.

So I brought the hedge cutting flail to bear on the problem. This allowed me to scalp the clumps with a bit more precision and I was making quite good progress until stupidly I ran out of fuel. It was putting quite a strain on the flail - I even had smoking belts at one point, and was obviously drinking far faster than I expected. After a bit of tooing and froing trying to find my RED jerry can (for red diesel) eventually got 20 litres in the tank and started the bleeding process - only to find in it's last gasps it's obviously sucked all the muck out and plugged the diesel filter solid. Not only that in removing the old filter and proving diesel flow the pipe from the filter to the injector pump snapped. You can see it waving in the breeze with that banjo fitting. I tried cutting and re-fitting but it's too short. Very brittle 8 mm o/d and about 5.5 mm i/d. Pushes on the banjo one end and has a nipple and internal support at the filter end.

Sunday so local ag place is closed and that put a stop to things today. I've ordered a filter from Amazon that will arrive Tuesday but I'll hot foot it to Culverwells (Robertsbridge) in the morning and see what they have. I'd far rather remake that pipe in copper.

pycoed:
I get it with the tussocks & clumps: the Allen is ex river authority, so came fitted with double wheels each side. The wheels are much larger than your Camon , plus a difflock helps!

It’s always the same with these little jobs isn’t it?
JOB :- Dredge pond with JCB
1 Cut rushes with fingerbar mower - fail
1a Unstick mower - fail
1b Find strops & help
1c Unstick mower - success
2 Remove fence with JCB – success
3 Scrape rushes with JCB front bucket- fail
4 Scrape rushes with JCB back actor -fail
5 Connect hedgecutter to tractor
6 Cut rushes with tractor hedgecutter – partial success - fail
7 Find red diesel
8 Bleed tractor – fail
9 Repair supply pipe- fail
10 Seek replacement pipe – fail

Result to date?
1 Pile of broken fence in field
2 Piles of smashed rush in field
3 Tractor broken
4 Need to travel miles to get parts
5 Pond still undredged

My day was MUCH more productive: having suspected gout in my right thumb (v. painful) I spent the day using the last couple of days of my NOW TV sports subscription watching a Joe Root century!

awemawson:
It's actually not THAT bad! The hedge flail stays fitted to the Ford 4600 as it's such a b.... to fit !

So bright and early I went to Culverwells and got a pattern filter and some very flexible fuel hose but no fittings. (Also got some more crow scarers - crows eating hen and pig food !)

So using a bit of heat I got the original olive and hose insert off & out. Insert was an exact fit for the new hose but I had to anneal and expand the olive (using the taper of a large centre punch) it get it to fit.

New diesel filter and hose fitted, system bled and I'm pleased to say she started up nicely after a bit of cranking (Discovery battery paralleled up with it's engine running as this tractor has no feed pump and relies on gravity.)

So next the pond . . .

So I finished off what I could of the rush mangling and put all the toys back in the shed. There are still loads of root clumps but I'm hoping a few cuts with the big flail mower will eventually tame them.

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