Slowly Working Toward Golf Season

Maybe in another 2 months or so we will be considering the beginning of golf season?  The chances for any sort of a spring flood, even a minor one, look pretty slim at this point (fingers crossed, knock on wood) so I would like to hope we could consider playing some golf by the start of April.  Last year we were hitting balls on the driving range on March 17th in shorts while it was 70 degrees....albeit with the ground still frozen four feet deep.  I would like to imagine that a "normal" spring, if such a thing exists, would let us be out hitting golf balls by sometime in the beginning of April.

With still 8 or so weeks left to go until we will be working outside again, Andy and I are still staying plenty busy in the shop.  Although I will have to admit, we are getting a bit of cabin fever, starting to drive each other crazy, and possibly could be caught talking to ourselves if the other one is working on a different project.

We finished all the important work on our highly used pieces of equipment, such as all the reel grinding and sharpening, bearing replacement, and fluid servicing back a few weeks ago.  We have now moved on to giving some much needed attention to some of the older and less used, but still very important equipment that we have.  These pieces include the slit seeder we use for reseeding after a flood, transport trailers, light duty utility carts, topdressers, water pumps, etc.

We have also started to work on the course accessories:  tearing apart ball washers, sanding and restaining tee markers and yardage posts, and painting cups.  Next week we get the new metal frames for the new cedar trash can holders we are going to make back from the powder coater, so we will be tearing into that project very soon.

Disassembling ball washers.  A local outfit is going to strip all the old paint
and powder coat both the body and lid.  Brand new ball washers next year!

18 water pumps!  Some of them over 10 years old, rusted and seized, engine
blown, etc.  We went through each one, taking parts from the dead pumps to
get as many to run as possible.  We finished with 10 working pumps and junked
the rest.

We use our 14' tandem axle trailer often for hauling equipment and picking
up large loads of pipe, wood, retaining wall blocks, etc from town.  Last fall
while doing 50 mph a wheel bearing seized up on me.  Needless to say, we started
by replacing all the wheel bearings....

New wheel bearings, and most importantly our trailer now has fenders and
working brake lights and turn signals meaning that it is actually street legal!
No more worry of a ticket heading into town to get supplies.  New wood,
safety chains, and a fresh coat of paint make it look like a new trailer.

Yardage stakes with a fresh coat of paint and stain and loaded up ready to go
back out on the course first thing in the spring.   Allie had another day off from
preschool, so she got to help.

The blades on our tractor mounted slit seeder were so worn down that they
didn't even cut into the ground anymore.  The bolts are placed so that it is
impossible to get a power tool on them, so Andy had to remove all 170 blades
(340 bolts) with hand wrenches.  Next week he gets to put all the new blades
back on.....with hand wrenches.

Andy getting close to having all the blades removed, the
slit seeder on the tractor is in the background.

We had the parts breakdown book out while working
on the slit seeder.  Our "shop foreman" took some time
to go over some diagrams with Andy so he knew how
to reassemble it when he was finished.

We completely took apart and painted the small trailers that are used to transport
our walking greens mowers around the course.  I scored the trailers used
for an amazing deal last year from a guy in Florida, they were just a little
rusty and in bad need of some touching up.

Trailer put back together with a mower loaded onto it.