Got lucky

I parked the Bobcat in July because it was pouring hydraulic at a leak. I had replaced a bad drive hose a few years ago, and I did not put a new O ring on the connection. So right from the git go we were getting small leakage, but it is hard to take the 250 lb tracks off the machine to get to the connection with the bad O ring. In July we started literally spilling hydraulic on the ground so I parked the bobcat and was going to wait to cooler weather to work on it because I cannot take the heat and get exhausted.

Well we overfill the empty hydraulic and start the Bobcat. I move some gravel on the horizontal plane, and no leakage. Then I start using the bucket to lift and spread some dirt. My wife notices oil on the ground and I pull the machine into a position where the Lull can help us pull the track off the machine, and we can zero in on the leak, and order an new O Ring and fix what we think is the leak. The wife notices some Hydraulic by the glass eye which allows you to check your hydraulic. So we have to lift the Cab and there is all kinds of hydraulic coming from the drain hose for when you change hydraulic fluid......we had overfilled the hydraulic. So we begin looking at the machine carefully. There is NO oil on the rubber track. When it was leaking from the o ring we believed the oil was coming from the main drive connection, but then we started checking visible hydraulic linkages, and Lo and behold we had a leak from the main cylinder on the right side which helps lift the bucket. The connection was loose and a quarter turn it was tight and not leaking. We had found the leak which was dripping on the rubber track making us believe that the main drive O ring was responsible. You have no idea how difficult it was going to be to remove the track in my weakened state and my wife has lost physical strength as we both age. I have a heavy equipment mechanic who works on our machines, but we were looking at close to a thousand or up to five thousand if the main pump had failed, so this is a huge lucky break, so now with cool weather I will be repairing and pulling trees from the river for firewood this winter.....back in business and happy.

Glad you are operational again.

Wife is running gravel and I am preparing a new base for my steel storage units.  We will be making a new stair down to the docks, and I will be renting an excavator to dredge some of my channels and capture some gravel to apply to the couple of miles of road which I need to maintain.  I am glad I parked the bobcat in the heat because the weather is really cool and comfortable.  Almost have the handicap ramp done.  Note the wife got a cast iron section for the deck which has fish.....it weighs about eighty pounds and is incredibly heavy duty and made in China, but she liked it, and she loves fishing in the evening which once we get the stairway and docks rehabbed we both will be fishing behind the house in the evenings.  I just have been having problems with the slope this last year....should be no problem now that the bobcat is running without leakage.

Good for you, and I see you put a handrail on the ramp. You will be safer this way.

When you reach the point where you need a walking stick or cane, I recommend you go directly to a walker, as you will be safer, and will be headed that way anyway. Get a simple Invacare Model No. 6291-1. Buy the wheel kit as an accessory, which makes the front two legs wheeled. This unit is very light weight, very cheap, but well-built, and you can fold it up an easily stow it in your car.





http://www.spinlife.com/Invacare-Adult-Dual-Release-Standard-Walker/spec.cfm?productID=2254

Seaoat, I am glad that you are being proactive about dealing with disability as your cancer progresses. If this cancer is going to leave you progressively more disabled before it takes you out, I would like to help you. I don't discuss my own affliction openly on the forum out of personal choice. I am not afraid to talk about it at all, I just choose not to do so openly. If you are going to become more disabled, I have been on a similar path for several years now. I can share with you what I have done to stay positive, what equipment I use (what works and what does not work), and point you to vendors where you can obtain it easily and cheaply, etc.

Half the battle of becoming disabled is waging a fighting retreat from your physical abilities, and the other half is acknowledging that your cup is still full and life is still worth living. I can tell you are there on both counts, but I can give you ideas to save you the hassle of dreaming-up everything yourself. I have done this 80% for myself without any occupational therapy or outside assistance. So, you may PM me at any time and we can communicate that way.

Z, thanks for kind thoughts, but I am still fighting the fight.  I go to Northwestern for my monthly shots, and had a bad month, but the Doctor keeps telling me its variable as to check out time, and he says the best results for endocrine cancer patients is to keep working.  I am down to 20% on my work, but these projects keep me focused.  This last week I have been energized because finally it is cooling off.  Today I spread gravel and worked the bobcat.  We have a couple of miles of road to maintain on the islands and in the fall I like to take sections and sprinkle some two inch gravel on the surface which in wet weather nicely blends with the underlying rock base.  It is so beautiful here that every breath is a miracle, and I have never been happier.  I know with the heart attack you have had some issues and we are the same age, but when I see your daughter I know you have also been blessed, and in the end you just celebrate each day......here is some road I finished dressing off today...

LOVE the metal fish on the railing.

LOVE the metal fish on the railing.


My wife was a river rat like me. When we met in college we both talked about our childhood on a river. She was in a rowboat at 5 fishing and rowing. I was on the river building forts on islands as a kid, and now both of us are in our retirement years like two kids reliving our youth. She saw the cast iron railing at a large hardware chain called Menards. It took two weeks to get it, and I could not believe how heavy it was to set it as a railing. She used to get all the men mad at her because she would take mini marshmellows and bait her hook and catch channel cat....It was bewildering to see her catch channel cat using that for bait, but we would build a fire and sit around and shore fish and have a few cocktails and enjoy the evening....I cannot drink anymore, but we are still two kids making these islands beautiful. The joy of the dog running a couple of miles each day, chasing squirrels, ground hogs, geese, and almost this enormous Eagle yesterday who had caught a fish and was eating it, when my wife saw it and drove the golf cart in another direction....paradise.

Very nice!

2seaoat wrote:I parked the Bobcat in July because it was pouring hydraulic at a leak.  I had replaced a bad drive hose a few years ago, and I did not put a new O ring on the connection.  So right from the git go we were getting small leakage, but it is hard to take the 250 lb tracks off the machine to get to the connection with the bad O ring.  In July we started literally spilling hydraulic on the ground so I parked the bobcat and was going to wait to cooler weather to work on it because I cannot take the heat and get exhausted.

Well we overfill the empty hydraulic and start the Bobcat.  I move some gravel on the horizontal plane, and no leakage.  Then I start using the bucket to lift and spread some dirt.  My wife notices oil on the ground and I pull the machine into a position where the Lull can help us pull the track off the machine, and we can zero in on the leak, and order an new O Ring and fix what we think is the leak.  The wife notices some Hydraulic by the glass eye which allows you to check your hydraulic.  So we have to lift the Cab and there is all kinds of hydraulic coming from the drain hose for when you change hydraulic fluid......we had overfilled the hydraulic.  So we begin looking at the machine carefully.  There is NO oil on the rubber track.  When it was leaking from the o ring we believed the oil was coming from the main drive connection, but then we started checking visible hydraulic linkages, and Lo and behold we had a leak from the main cylinder on the right side which helps lift the bucket.  The connection was loose and a quarter turn it was tight and not leaking.  We had found the leak which was dripping on the rubber track making us believe that the main drive O ring was responsible.  You have no idea how difficult it was going to be to remove the track in my weakened state and my wife has lost physical strength as we both age.  I have a heavy equipment mechanic who works on our machines, but we were looking at close to a thousand or up to five thousand if the main pump had failed, so this is a huge lucky break, so now with cool weather I will be repairing and pulling trees from the river for firewood this winter.....back in business and happy.

Question, Seaoat. Have you ever harvested young trees? With this Florida soil, I have had small trees pulled from the ground with a tow chain...I wonder if this would work for the others. What I would like to do is save the trees...maybe sell them. I know I would have to ball them in burlap and fill the holes. Should I dig around them first? They are mostly live oak, red maple and magnolia...anywhere from 10'-30' tall. Or should I get a ditch witch or something similar?

That's a nice little pond there. Is that a modular house?

That's a nice little pond there. Is that a modular house?


I will take some more shots of the "pond" this afternoon to give you a better perspective. The house is almost a hundred and fifty years old and it has been moved once when a major league manager retired from baseball and moved into it, and he wanted to be on the river at this beautiful location. We had another house on the islands which was about 2800 sq. ft, but the floods were too much, and we were cleaning up two times a year for the last 12 years. We sold that house and built a new bridge behind this house. This house is only about 1200 square foot ranch, and the kitchen floor is uneven as most of the homes in this small community where some homes go from the 1840s where they still have the old fashion hardware where you have a pull at the front door and a wire comes into the house and rings a bell. Many of the homes from the 1850s are made of limestone which was quarried at a pit where I often get my gravel.

Tex

Each species of tree has transplant protocols. Oaks have a horizontal root system while a black Walnut has a vertical tap root. I will show you how we transplant Maples on the islands. I have made a dirt ramp down to the river bottom. Whirlibird seeds for maples fall on the river bottom and we have thousands of small maple trees growing in the wet bottom. I go to our meadow regions of the islands and take a bucket of dirt, and then take that dirt and help build the ramp further into the wet river bottom. I then take a bucket of small Maple trees and take them from their river bottom home to the hole I made with the bobcat. This allows the trees to slide into the hole. This is not the best time of the year to transplant because we are dry until November and you have to put five gallons on each tree each day until you get a soaking rain. Photos to come. I was at Northwestern getting my shots and I am not feeling that good but it is a beautiful day.

Maples transplanted this spring using the bobcat to bucket a river bottom tree to the meadows portion of the islands.

Northwest view of the pond. The eagles will eat their fish on the gravel bar, and in the spring the American Pelicans will fish the water in formation as they surround and eat 10lbs of fish a day. The Eagles are large and when you come up on one that is eating fish on the islands it is amazing how large they are.

Beautiful property Seaoat.

This is where I had to wade into the river to save two goose hunters who had waders on and got caught in the current retrieving a goose they had shot.  It was the end of November and the river had iced along the shore, and the current is incredibly strong.  I was building roads on the north end of the island in the photo above when I heard their shotgun blasts and saw them wade after their birds.......my back was too them for 15 minutes, and when I returned to the Northern end of the road they were crying for help and totally exhausted as they helplessly were floating down the deeper portion of the river.  My cell phone had no service, and I was over a mile and a half of roads away from a phone to call for help, so I had to strip down to my underwear and go get them.

I bounced off the bottom to keep my head above the water and conserved my energy doing this because in this freezing water I was afraid I was going to cramp.  I got to the first hunter mid channel and he immediately tried to grab me and I smacked his hands away and rotated him and grabbed him around the neck(I had been trained to do this) and took control of him and bounced him to shore.  He could hardly move when he said the other guy could not swim and he will drown if I did not go back in..........I was freezing, exhausted because my upper left lung lobe had been removed the year before, and I was certain that I had nothing left.  I went back in bounced off the bottom, but this time the water never went over my head so I conserved energy.  This guy did not even grab me, he was exhausted and had been keeping his head above the water by bouncing off the bottom in this shallower portion of the river.  I pulled him ashore and put him down next to his buddy and they both were thanking me, but I was now having hypothermia set in and knew that the bobcat had been running and had a heater.  I put my clothes back on and got into the bobcat to warm up when I saw the boat they had been in pull up and stop where they were laying on the shore.  Their boat mate had jammed the lower unit and the motor would not start, and the idiot instead of letting the boat free float to the people in distress he had stayed with the boat trying to figure out how to start the motor.  This river is dangerous.  Here is the east view where this happened.

I have a 10 year maintenance dredging permit from ACOE and DNR which allows me to keep my boat channels clear, and being that the river is a gravel base, I stockpile the gravel, and they allow me to put up to 6 inches of gravel on the roads. I have 3.5 miles of dirt and gravel roads so when I dredge I convert dirt roads to gravel roads. The problem with using river gravel is that they are rounded rock worn down from tumbling in the river, and when applied to the dirt roads it sinks and disappears. I have learned that the most efficient method of building a road is to use 3 inch to 6 inch fractured dolomite which when I put a thin layer on dirt, I can work it into the soil and it locks up like a jig saw puzzle, and then the rounded river stone and gravel works it way into the crevices and I get a solid road which does not disappear in a flood.

What is fun is to install a gravel road over a dirt road. The first thing you need to do with the bobcat is cut down about six inches and peel off the black dirt. After each flood about a half inch of new soil covers the islands, and over the years you get about 6 inches of soil over the old gravel roads which go all the way back to the 1860s when the owner of the islands was a gravel company which would pull the river stone out the river, and transport by wagon to their cement plant which was four miles away. Once I expose the old gravel base I use my dump truck to get 3-6 inch rock and work it over the old base, and then in the fall I will dredge and take the dump and spread it over the limestone, and then I level it with the bobcat. Each flood I have to scrape about 2.5 miles of the gravel roads or you will get two or three inches of flood sediment which when wet will get vehicles stuck.

I have about fifty acres which had been farmed only 25 years ago on the big island. The farmer used to take a homemade barge to take his tractor over to the island. They used to raise sheep on one of the islands, but the farmer had to use the barge with a flood to get them to high ground. I spoke with an old timer who worked for the farmer, and they lost a whole barge load of sheep when the homemade barge tipped slightly and the sheep just stampeded over the fence on the barge into the river.....they lost all the sheep. Back in the 1850s they had a steam engine boat which would take town people out to the islands to picnic. It also became quite the location for artist from the Art institute in Chicago with the beautiful vistas. I sometimes can spend the whole day out there and never see anything which is man made....it is like going back in time.

I am going to have to now use the lull and drag a steel container about a mile to set it up eventually on this gravel pad. What we are doing now is taking our Park model Rv and taking the decks off and the supports it sits on the river edge, and it is going to be extremely dangerous pulling this out. We have concrete blocks which have settled and one axle was damaged when we set it. we are going to have to crawl up under it (it has gotten cold so the snakes are not going to nipping at our ankles) and build three new support pillars out of block and slowly raise the entire 35 foot park model which weighs 19k lbs using hydraulic jacks. I will then call and have a tire mechanic replace the axle or simple replace the blown tires. Once the tires are good I will build a ramp with railroad ties under the tires, and will chain the steel frame, and then take two 10k pound electric winches which I will chain to trees south of the Park model. I will then position the Lull parallel to the Park Model and bring the hoist over the tongue which is sitting on a sinking 6x3x3 concrete block. This will be very delicate because one mistake or failure in any of the points of movement may cause the 40k Park model to shift and fall into the river. I will gently raise the tongue and begin retracting the same as my wife is slowly having both winches pull the park model back to this gravel pad. We will probably get this done mid week and will be calling the insurance man to get it insured before the move. We will set the park model in Navarre or Milton, but probably will set it in the Fort Meyer area as I will be looking for an RV lot for sale. I will show photos as we are disassembling the deck and crawling under and checking the supports. I have more energy with this cool weather.

We are taking off the decking now.  I had the Park model specially made and had lippert steel in Indiana modify the frame where I took a 11 foot steel square tube welded to the frame of the Park model, and then took a quarter inch smaller steel tub which could slip into the 11 foot tube which I had six of these welded to the underbelly and had sheet metal close off the bottom.  I then had them drill holes in the six footers and the 11 footer with multiple holes which allows me to slide the square tube into the larger frame, shim with steel and presto I have a 4-6 foot extension over the river which allowed me to set it right on the edge of the bluff above the water and wood frame the deck.  We are removing the deck first. Note the boards now being stripped from the deck outside the front sliding glass door.

If we are successful, we will live in the park model December, Jan, and Feb. I will be checking with the insurance company if I can get my sando shots at Moffit cancer center in Tampa after my October 30th shot. If it is ok we will set the Park Model end of October, and spend some time in Pensacola rehabbing a rental home, and then back to the river for Thanksgiving, and then off to south Florida for most of December returning a week before Christmas to celebrate with the kids, and then a shot on Christmas eve and down to the RV. We are hoping we can find an RV lot with a Florida room already in place, otherwise we will find a contractor who will work with us allowing us to do most of the work. You really need the Florida room to have space for poker games and social gatherings. The Park model is tight as you can see. We will bring our tools in any regard and I may get a Uhaul and move the furnishings out of a furnished house we have in Pensacola and move the same to Fort Meyer......all dependent on energy and health.

z, I will have to pass on which river, but we are close to the quad cities. I have been in serious discussions with my wife in deeding the property over to the township, county, or state with what is called a remainder interest. So I would allow my children and grandchildren to enjoy the islands, but in 80 years it would revert to the remainder interest which would be the government. This is simply too beautiful of an area to have happen chance that some future owner will not preserve the natural beauty of this unique and historical area. I have lost more money than some make in a lifetime, and my wife is pretty much set with a great pension after I pass. Our kids are all doing well, and I have always found that large estates passed to a next generation create weak and worthless people, and I certainly do not have to worry about that much anymore as health, investments, and real estate all took a serious decline at the same time. There are exceptions I have seen where good people inherit money and keep their work ethic, but I have seen a lifetime of the curse of inheritance. This country needs to stop this plague by returning the estate tax to a one million dollar exemption.....anything over that will be taxed. It currently is five million and the traitors in this country want to eliminate it entirely. Nothing would make me happier than 80 years from now the public would have access to these islands. The diminution of value with the remainder interest will be small with my passing in the next year or so, and my wife can sell the property getting a little less, or keep it in the family for the kids and grandkids to enjoy, but eventually it will be conserved by the remainder interest transferring to a public body.

What? You don't trust the govt to govern your property when you cede to them every other individuals rights?

What? You don't trust the govt to govern your property when you cede to them every other individuals rights?


I am a Teddy Roosevelt/Abe Lincoln Republican.....I think government has shown that in fact they can manage our parks and government land competently while letting people enjoy the beauty of nature.

A note.....Tom Skilling did not make our social gathering this evening.....many disappointed people, and I could not take a picture of Tom holding a sign saying darts work.......