Tom and I Open Some More Trails On a Neighbor’s Place and Testing the Blade

Thursday 19, 2025 Guerneville CA.

Change to the blade

I wanted to test my blade out today to see why it’s not working properly as I’m trying to get John Deere to fix it under warranty. I gave it to them to test about six  months ago and they couldn’t find anything wrong with it so wouldn’t fix it. I did tell them it was intermittent.

I installed a volt meter onto the machine switch so I could watch the meter to see if the switch voltage would change during the switching when the problem occurred.

I got the blade hooked up and took off to meet Tom at my neighbor’s place.

Trail clearing

I pushed stuff out of the way to clear a trail through the woods.

Tom used his chainsaw to help clear out the dead trees across where we wanted to go.

Then he would scout ahead to show me where to make the trail.

There was a lot of this thick scotch broom that was hard to clear out of the way as it would mostly just bend over.

We finished up here and we headed back where we started from.

Testing the blade results and what I learned testing it

The volt meter on the machine switch remained the same so there was no problem with the machine which showed the problem was in the blade.

And with the blade in the air, I could not get the blade to fail.

I learned that it only failed when the blade was in the dirt and that’s why the John Deere people could not get the blade to fail and didn’t fix it.

The blade had to be in the dirt to fail which would put some pressure on the blade, and that’s why the John Deere guys couldn’t get the blade to fail as they  only tested it in the air.

So now I can report to  them what’s happening and get them to replace the defective electric spring  loaded valve on it that changes the blades switch function.

Nice day.