[mitchmaine]

hey erica, you had to register your tractor (truck) in the state you call home, but if you hauled over the road, you were never home anyway so it didn’t matter where your trailer hailed from cause most of the time it wasn’t yours and you were just moving it for the carrier.
maine charged ten dollars for a trailer plate, which made it very popular to register here and the plate had no weight or axle limits beyond the road or state you were in.
good for maine cause it was revenue on trailers running up and down on somebody elses roads.
don’t know how the laws and rules apply now but haven’t heard anything new.

best wishes, mitch

[mitchmaine]

@Scott G 21604 wrote:

I’m beyond stoked! Getting hard to concentrate on the tasks at hand…

I have the MFS website up right now so that I can familiarize myself with the region, forest cover types, etc. Seems as though many of the same issues face forestry in N America, regardless of which region you are located.

when i was a kid, scott, they were saying the state of maine had been cut over seven times. the first crop of 200 foot by twelve foot white pines were taken off with handtools, and now they are mowing thirty year old spruce and fir with mechanical harvesters. go figure. anyway, the best we have now are fifth growth pine. some nice patches here and there, but the skidder took a big chunk out of the principle. hope you like the choppin’. a trees still a tree.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey scott, i’m hoping to get there with a hoss or two. hope to see and meet you.
mitch

[mitchmaine]

The pike pole was the tool of the river drivers. Nothing but a spike driven into the end of a twenty foot pole. Good for balance and pushing off but not much use in a jam or rolling logs off the bank into the river. And they would try rolling logs with a cant dog, but like you’ve heard, useless as half a pair of pliers. Like trying to drive a nail with a pulp hook. So one day (1858) this guy walks into a blacksmith shop (bangor), and says to the smith (joe peavey), drive a pike point into the end of this cant dog, or hang a cant hook on the end of this pike pole, without taking offense, he does what he was asked, his name become synonymous with the tool, and two years later he has a foundry called Bangor Edge Tool Co. and is making thousands of peaveys and peavey axes a year. By 1884 they are making 15,000 peaveys a year. At least that’s the way I heard it told. We had one stamped Maine Central Railroad, so everyone must have used them. Slickest tool ever invented.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

i have to agree with the shoeing stocks folk. they may look like a medievil torture device, but we had a stubborn mare. if you got her off the floor she would lay on you. after a few times in, she turned right around. she has horrible feet but is a dream to work on.
my feelings on stocks is its harder for the trimmer than the trimee. i think it is much easier holding the foot you are trimming.

[mitchmaine]

try lifting your plow up or laying it over so you can stretch a tape across square from the landslide to the farthest tip of the wing of the plowshare. that should be the width of the furrow you would cut and the measurement of your plow. most plows let you bolt on different size points and change the size. like the bar on a chainsaw. you might see a stamp in raised letters under the point if you can get a good look at it. that would tell you too. the points on our plow measure and say 11″. i was surprised to find that number. didn’t know they made that number. good luck, mitch

[mitchmaine]

less is always more, isn’t it?
a few hundred people on that fairgrounds who all really want to be there and are excited about it gives each of us more room and freedom to get involved in small discussions here and there, or roam around and actually see what there is to see with some peace and quiet. worth $50 bucks to me. no carnivals, please.
and thanks again for all the invisible stuff that happens when nobodys looking to make stuff like tunbridge happen.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

Hey bill,
Hard to get the same satisfaction out of a tractor, ain’t it?
When you know your horses and what they are capable of doing, and they know the tone of your voice and trust you not to get ‘em in trouble, when you do ask them to give it up, there is always this little extra something that comes from who knows where. And that’s the beauty of it for me.
Different from hauling back on the throttle of the tractor and digging a deeper hole.

Thanks for your story, and thanks for introducing yourself there Saturday over at tunbridge. Nice to meet you.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

@john plowden 21466 wrote:

Donn – whoever you get the harness from make sure the front tug is the correct length for your horses –
John

right, john. i was talking with les, and he called it ” blousing out ” when the front sidebacker took the strain and the tug falls loose.
he also said new d ring came with 27″ front tugs which were way too long. 20″ for haflingers, 22″ – 24″ for larger horses was what he recommended. pretty sure that was what he said. nice man.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey carl, you sure have a funny way of resting up. working your animals, planting, plowing, chopping wood, and butchering pigs. but thanks for all you and lisa did when you weren’t resting and working on that fair. its a wonderful thing.

thanks again, mitch and penny

[mitchmaine]

[QUOTE=jac;21425 I upset some of the older guys when I turn up with a team in American harness.. not “traditional”.. but a lot more efficient and easier on the horses I recon..
John

hey john, i noticed jon waterer used belly backers but he had a pioneer powered forecart, and other (american?) farm tools.

it seemed to me that in shafts or pole, the english system used chain for the tugs. but the only thing i have to go on are a few photographs. i’m guessing there was a leather tug in use there, but need you to answer that one. those pictures were 1950-60’s so should be the “modern equipment” of the day.

everyone sent their regards from tunbridge. mitch

[mitchmaine]

very sorry to hear of your troubles. eight weeks should give you time to make a good plan. good luck next time around. keep us posted on progress. thanks, mitch

[mitchmaine]

3″ here too, bill, and still it comes down. fair amount of breeze with it. standing water everywhere.
heading out for tunbridge in a few hours. when the sun comes up, should be a pretty ride. can’t imagine there is a leaf left in vermont, but we’ll let ya know.
best wishes, mitch and penny

[mitchmaine]

Hey john, it’s hard to imagine that my farm and yours were at the bottom of the ocean under a mile and a half of icesheet 12,000 years ago. Our thin ribbon of topsoil was sea bottom mixed with sand and “rock flour” ground from the top of the bedrock. The land sprung up, once the ice retreated and started growing small bushes and later, trees. I still forget that our life depends on that foot of dirt. We all measure our farms in hectares or acres. Hardly anyone, including me, measures their farm 8” deep. But that’s why they call us farmers and not miners.
My neighbor keeps 60 acres of cow corn, and a few wet springs ago, had trouble getting on his land to start. He hired out a jobber who came with a 225 HP tractor and a 7 point subsoiler. It was on three point hitch and had no downpreasure so made a couple trips around before breaking through your plow pan. But when he did he buried it a couple feet and it was like he pulled the plug in the sink. Standing water just vanished and his wheel ruts dried up and it took him quite a while to do his job, but you could literally drive around behind him in a pickup on land you could barely walk on before. Quite the miracle.
a thought. one subsoiler (i have one for my tractor) or one point, should i say, even at a shallow depth, a foot or so, is a lot of draft. never tried it with a team but wonder how well they would do with it. like i said, our soil is marine clay, anyone who ever tried digging a ditch in it with a handshovel, knows what i mean. once you get below the topsoil its like scratching at granite. others soil might be different.
good luck with your project, mitch

one other thing about mixing technologies, john. in harrowing a peice of subsoiled ground, the horses would step around the furrows or slices made by the subsoiler. the subsoiler doesn’t flip or turn soil or bring it up. but as soon as the ground was harrowed, none of us, horses or i, could tell where it had been sliced, and the horses would step into the ruts and stumble. alot. and it worried me alot. still does. by the time we cultivated, the soil was beginning to pack and no problem. just a heads up.

[mitchmaine]

i agree. the horses seem set a little ahead for more leverage. the whole apparatus seems built for turning and stopping.
grey, it looks like a museum? of some kind. any description of where the wagons came from or specific use? interesting hubs. must have been quite a good job pulling those wagons empty.

mitch

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