Wednesday May 14, 2025 Guerneville CA.
Neighbors driveway work
I headed back to my neighbor’s driveway to help him fix it up so a fire truck could get up to his place during a fire.
I tried to dig out the big fir stump for a couple of hours, but the big roots were just too big for Skiddy and held the big stump firmly in the ground. I had to give up on that for now.
In the process of spreading the dirt from the big stump out on the road, one of the tracks on Skiddy came partially off which brought everything to a halt. The tracks are adjusted right, but for some reason the tracks come off on these things, sometimes just a bit too easily.
I didn’t have any tools with me to get the track back on and besides I needed my brother Tom to run the machine while I helped get the track back on.
I headed for home and found Tom working on his house. l got the tools and the grease gun and we drove back up to where the machine was parked and got to it.
We were able to get the track back on but when I tried to use the grease gun to adjust the track to tighten it up, grease kept coming out the side of the fitting and I couldn’t pump the track back up.
Looking carefully at the grease gun part that fits on the grease fitting I discovered the grease gun part had a broken tooth so that wasn’t going to work. That required another trip home to get another grease gun.
I pumped the track adjuster up with grease and drove the machine a little bit and checked the track tension again and gave it some more grease and it was good to go.
I worked on tidying up the work I’d done and then went on home for the day.
I’m going to order up a battery powered grease gun from Amazon right now as putting all the grease that is needed into the track adjuster is a real pain.
Nice day.
I have seen a couple of You Tubers videos that have John Deere skid steers, and both of them have said a number of time that John Deere’s are one of the worst for having rubber tracks come off. One of them bought a new set of tracks, not John Deere, and has had no more problems.
Hi Kenny,
That’s interesting info. I hope I’ll remember that when I need new tracks. I did just get a power grease gun to make the pumping back up with grease much easier.
Bob
I have a friend with a skidsteer. We worked for 2 months clearing trees and materials after hurricanes hit our town. We never had a track come off. I believe something is wrong with your machine. At times we had 3 machines running, no tracks ever came off.
Hi James,
Well, the machine is only a year old, so not likely something wrong with it and the tracks are adjusted to their minimum spec of one inch. I have been surprised a couple of times when the track came off a bit on the easy side. When I come too close to a big root in the ground by a big tree seems to be the worst. As the big root pushes sideways on the bottom of the track causing the track to get off the rollers. Gettin too close to a rock or even some hard ground can also cause pressure on the side of the track also causes this problem and also getting big rocks in the rollers has caused it to come loose.
I am operating in some real extremes such as real steep mountains and narrow roads which I have to turn real sharp on to turn around and of course big chucks of wood from the big trees are in the dirt I’m moving around to do the road work.
Saying all this, I am surprised I’m having as much trouble keeping the tracks on as I’m having. I am getting pretty good at getting the tracks back on though. Practice makes perfect. :O) It also might be that you guys are better operators than I. :O)
Bob