The pride and joy of my kitchen has suffered a major set back. The tractor died on Saturday. *Sigh* On the agenda for Saturday night was ground rib eye burgers with cheese and mushrooms…that was until the tractor quit on me. It wasn’t the screeching grinding halt of a noise that I’ve read about on other blogs. Nope, I could tell right away from the sound and behavior that I lost part of the gear, it was stripped. There are theories that the plastic housing is to blame, that it’s not durable enough for the speed of the motor and that it flexes, causing the gears to grind. I’m going to disagree, at least in my case, because it would appear to be improper alignment.. After pulling the head off and observing the guts, I still can’t figure out where the rough grinding sound is coming from. See, there was a ton of gooey grease in there. I think there must be ball bearings underneath the assembly unit where the dough hook attaches. I didn’t want to do a full tear down, I’ll leave that up to the shop. In the meantime I’ve been looking around online for a professional grade (restaurant grade?) meat grinder. Bread making is also on hold, but I can manage doing that manually if I get desperate.
Yesterday we hosted a small Open House for Pick Up Day. Always fun to hang out and visit with the regular locals and even better is when someone new shows up! We got to meet a couple new faces this time and overall I think everyone had a good time. The afternoon was crisp so I had Paul light a small fire and that seemed to brighten up the gloomy winter day.
We had been shopping the day before for vinyl and Paul played several of his jazz and blues records. We stayed away from Christmas music, seems like everyone is already burned out on holiday tunes.
Through the front window I snapped some pics of the soggy vineyard:
White sage and red blooms on the pineapple sage:
I rotated the head to capture the non-worn part of the gear:
Below is the worn section…tragic:
