#15 – 7.11.21

So… I have to admit I left out some really lame news in last week’s newsletter.  I didn’t only work on the road like I said.. I also took the time to break my excavator again!!! 😦  I wasn’t emotionally ready to discuss it last week and I didn’t know exactly what was wrong. All I knew for sure was that the excavator no longer spun in circles……………..   .. I thought the massive bearing, the swing bearing, that the upper half of the excavator sits on was broken.  And to replace that you have to separate the upper half from the lower half and it is a MASSIVE job. So this week I had a mechanic go look at it and it turns out that the main gear box that turns the machine is what fell apart.. And it’s really busted up. 

 A used replacement part should be in the neighborhood of $2,500 – $4,000..  But the big problem is … there appears to be no used part available out in the world right now 😦   .. We can cross our fingers and hope that one turns up .. or there was one place that I found that would build a brand new gearbox for me for $10,000 with a 10-12 week lead time…….

So…. what does all this mean?  At this point I am not sure what to do.  I don’t want to keep sinking money into the excavator if it keeps breaking.. but…. at the sametime its resale value when broken is not great.  If I fix it its resale value is close to 20k, which is what I got it for delivered to my property.  But can I even fix it? With part availability, maybe not.   

I haven’t had a lot of time to consider other options.  We might just have to go back to the white board and come up with a whole new strategy.  If anyone out there has any brilliant ideas.. I’m all ears 🙂 ..  

On the bright side… I have done 90% of the excavation that I wanted to have done this summer. Also, I’ve probably done enough work already to pay for the excavator.  This idea was always a gamble.. and by taking the gamble I don’t believe I’m in the hole. I am probably a little better off than if I had paid someone else to do all of that work.  And I did have a lot of fun doing it! 🙂 

So no progress on our land project this week except that I got a new appropriately sized transformer and have the solar working! And since we couldn’t work on the land we took a break and went on a super cool hike that the trailhead is 2 miles from our land.

Not sure if I will have much to write about in the next coming weeks but I’ll keep you updated if anything worth mentioning happens.  Either way .. we will find a way 🙂 

Mark