Faster than expected, I got my small chainsaw back today. The guy who did the work said that for a 20+ year old saw, it was in very good shape and only needed some cleaning and minor tuning to make it run again. I still need to tighten the blade, which is fairly new based on how much metal is still on the teeth. He strongly suggested running closer 6 oz. of oil per gallon of gas instead of the typical 4 oz. Yeah, it'll smoke a little more but it will be better for the saw in the long-run. I may foul a plug doing this, but compared to the cost of a rebuild I can live with that. The extra smoke will help keep the mosquitoes away! I've been burning the wood from the first apple tree I took down, but my stock is getting low so it's about time to drop another one. I've got a scraggly pine in the front yard which is just dying to meet the new (old) saw.
I also took delivery on the replacement tires for the tractor yesterday. Since I had an hour to kill this afternoon before getting dinner ready I decided to see how hard it was going to be to replace the tire myself. Once I took the tire & rim off the tractor, I let out the air and stood on the sidewall to unseat the bead of the tire. Since I weigh 230 pounds or so, gravity gave me a hand in doing this. A little quality-time with some wide flat-blade screwdrivers and I finally got the old tire off the rim. Putting the new one on was easier, but the trick was getting enough air into the tire (without an innertube) to seat the beads on the rim. A trick I learned a while back was to wrap a tie-down strap around the center of the tire. By pulling the center tread of the tire in towards the rim, it forces the outside edges out to where they need to be. Last step is to dump air in as fast as possible and hope that you can get air in faster than it can get out. When the trick works, the beads seat and the tire fills with air. Re-install, and you're done. Well, after repeating 3 more times for the other tires... I'll do those this weekend.
No, I didn't go with white-walls OR spinners.
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Be sure not to use the screwdrivers on the bead of the new tires. If they are anything like tubeless bike tires, you can damage them. Use tire levers if you need a tool to get them on. A set of levers can't cost very much.
I used the screwdrivers to remove the old tires and made a set of spoons for the new ones. I have enough scrap steel around here, so I started with a 12"x1" strip 1/8" thick. I rounded the edges with a flap-disk on an angle grinder and then rounded the corners. A little fun-time with a 3 pound hammer on the anvil of my bench vice put a little curve to the spoons. It took about 20 minutes to make the pair of 'em, and they worked like crap. The metal was either too soft or too thin, as they bent too easily. I threw 'em back on the scrap pile and used a couple of wide flat screwdrivers and everything worked out fine.
I'm also taking the advice of people on tractor forums (geeze, there's a forum for everything) and putting some "green slime" in each tire, since tractor tires are prone to punctures. The slime is supposed to stay liquid enough to fill punctures or leaks as they happen. I used it on an old trailer tire a few years back which was in worse shape than any of these tractor tires and it worked great.
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