Bob's Eyes

Friday May 16, 2025 Guerneville CA.

Looking for error codes

John Deere needed some error codes to figure out what was wrong with Skiddy causing my bucking problems. To get some, I needed to work the rig, so I headed up into the forest to do some work.

Fueling up Skiddy for the day.

I hauled a couple of loads of rock down to the old road I’ve been working on. After dumping the load and coming back up the hill it bucked on me a few times but didn’t throw any error codes.

I’ve been thinking of opening up this old road that went down the side of the hill off another old road. The only problem was that road was real steep where it took off from the other old road and it had a lot of downed trees and brush across where it started.

Here’s what that old road looked like as I started to push on through all the debris.

I was concerned about starting to work down that road and not being able to back up or just getting tangled up in all the trees and brush.

I got started off ok, but eventually, the machine wouldn’t back up, but just spun the tracks and so I got tangled up in all the brush so there was only one thing to do and that was to just go for it and push on through until I got down to where the road flattened off. I did that hoping a track wouldn’t come off from being all tangled up in the trees and brush.

Now that I was down on the old road, there was only one way to go and that was down that old road and there were lots of old rotten trees across the road I delt with as I preceded.

I made it down to another old road and got out of there.

I hauled some more rock on the main dirt road I’d been working on. I was hauling rock to this hair-pin turn.

And I finally got some error codes.

This one.

Which means the fuel pressure is low.

And I got these two more, but don’t have any idea what they mean. I’ll have to contact John Deere on Monday about these codes.

Since I have most of the work done on these old roads, I decided to drive Skiddy back down to my house and had Tom give me a ride back up the hill to get my side by side.

Nice day.

Thursday May 15, 2025 Guerneville CA.

Runners

I’d heard there was some kind of run going on today which went up into the state park. I was surprised to see all these cones along the road leading up into the state park. They usually run early in the morning so I didn’t see any of the runners because I’m not an early morning type person.

Neighbor’s road work

I headed on up to a neighbor’s place far in the back woods to hopefully finish up his road work if all goes well.

He’d asked if he could try out Skiddy a few days ago so when we went down to his little valley and I showed him how to run it, telling him to start out by just driving it around a bit to get use to the controls.

He had a little ditch crossing the road here, so I said to go ahead and try fixing up the crossing. Not to worry, I’ll fix it up when you are done with it. He did pretty good and thought, boy, this is a nice toy. There might be one in his future.

Big fir stump

I did some more work on his roads and asked him to use his little backhoe to see if he could dig out that big fir tree stump I couldn’t get out the other day. He did some work with his little backhoe, but I still couldn’t budge the thing with my machine, but he did uncover this big tap root enough so he could cut it with his chainsaw. Once he cut it I could push the big fir stump over.

Now, all I had to do was push it off the road.

I got behind it and Skiddy pushed it towards the edge of the road.

And on over the side of the road and out of the way.

Once the stump was out of the way, I was able to finish up the road work he wanted done.

Just a thank you will do

He said he owes me and what can he do for me. Usually, I just ask for a good dinner but with my corn problem that’s no longer an option. I said just a thank you will do.

Then I thought that maybe he could help my brother Tom remove a big tree from his yard that is too big and too close to his house. He likes to climb big trees so said he’d have a look at it. He doesn’t mind the heights, but I sure do.

It was time to take Skiddy back up the hill. He had so much fun driving Skiddy earlier, that he wanted to drive it back up the hill, so I let him, then I took him back to his place and headed towards home.