Arbor Trolley, 5 years on

[Billhook]

10 hours ago, nepia said:

Or you could forego the 'pleasure' of mowing and enjoy the motion of the grass, the bugle, the buttercups, the clover, the bees, the butterflies... 😊

We have that in the field next door. Ten acres of birdsfoot trefoil, clover, various grasses, fig buttercup, common sainfoin .Quite a few orchids, pyramid and common spotted and loads of bees and other insects 

 This covers the old Saxon graveyard 

 

 

 

Edited July 11, 2021 by Billhook

[nepia]

Wish I'd kept my mouth shut now.  10 acres?  Great stuff; puts my square yards into a sort of 'how small do I feel' perspective!

Respect for that 👍

 

We have Common Spotted and Pyramidal orchids; I'm surprised to see them flowering in what until this year was always lawn.

 

Edited July 11, 2021 by nepia

[Doug Tait]

Your small yardage will be quite a big deal to the little things though.

[Billhook]

Climate control, wipers, headlights, stereo Cd and radio, power steering, four wheel drive, diesel, heated and electric adjustable seats and windows but no instruments hence the price of £250 for the MOT failure.  Not many mowers have this spec!

 

 

[harvey b davison]

I bought a brand new Panda 4x4 white in 1986 when they just brought out the FIRE engine version.  £5000, really bought as a replacement for the farm Ford Escort Van which was the same price but had limited vision pulling out of our gateways and was hopeless off road.
I had a set of Greens gang mowers that I used to pull with a Little Grey Fergie, which was sometimes cold and exposed in bad weather and I wondered if the little Panda could cope.  It did easily.  I thought that something must break on it due to this abuse and it was such a luxury to mow like this that I could not go back to the tractor.
I had a heater, wipers, headlights for night work, radio stereo and best of all when I had friends to stay I would ask them if they wanted to mow the lawns with me.  The answer was obviously "no way" but I enticed them with a can of beer and the next time they came they asked if they could mow the lawns for me!  A win win situation!
So these Pandas kept coming up for sale in the local paper, not macho enough for men and too complicated for women so they were going for between £50 and£150 so I kept buying them since we have a spare barn.
When my parents were alive they had one each for going around the farm. They loved them as they were a bit higher and easy for them to enter and depart and simple to use.
A bloke in the village had a Volvo XC70 which had failed its MOT because the instrument panel had packed up.  The cost of replacing everything was well over£1000 so he was about to scrap it but let me have it for £250.  Diesel, auto, aircon, 4x4, electric seats, power steering.  I bought another set of Greens for it for the farmyard area so I now have about four acres to mow incomplete comfort in about an hour.  The way the grass has been growing recently it has been a godsend
 
 

Haha love it. If I remember correctly the backrest on the rear seats was basically just a piece of material attached to a bar that went across the back.

[Billhook]

9 hours ago, harvey b davison said:

On 11/07/2021 at 07:53, Billhook said:

I bought a brand new Panda 4x4 white in 1986 when they just brought out the FIRE engine version.  £5000, really bought as a replacement for the farm Ford Escort Van which was the same price but had limited vision pulling out of our gateways and was hopeless off road.
I had a set of Greens gang mowers that I used to pull with a Little Grey Fergie, which was sometimes cold and exposed in bad weather and I wondered if the little Panda could cope.  It did easily.  I thought that something must break on it due to this abuse and it was such a luxury to mow like this that I could not go back to the tractor.
I had a heater, wipers, headlights for night work, radio stereo and best of all when I had friends to stay I would ask them if they wanted to mow the lawns with me.  The answer was obviously "no way" but I enticed them with a can of beer and the next time they came they asked if they could mow the lawns for me!  A win win situation!
So these Pandas kept coming up for sale in the local paper, not macho enough for men and too complicated for women so they were going for between £50 and£150 so I kept buying them since we have a spare barn.
When my parents were alive they had one each for going around the farm. They loved them as they were a bit higher and easy for them to enter and depart and simple to use.
A bloke in the village had a Volvo XC70 which had failed its MOT because the instrument panel had packed up.  The cost of replacing everything was well over£1000 so he was about to scrap it but let me have it for £250.  Diesel, auto, aircon, 4x4, electric seats, power steering.  I bought another set of Greens for it for the farmyard area so I now have about four acres to mow incomplete comfort in about an hour.  The way the grass has been growing recently it has been a godsend
 
 

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Haha love it. If I remember correctly the backrest on the rear seats was basically just a piece of material attached to a bar that went across the back.

That was on the mk1 version, which was truly minimalist, but in 1986 they introduced the FIRE engine version with proper seats and other improvements

[Billhook]

On 10/07/2021 at 17:18, Billhook said:

Eleven years on!

Put the orange bars into the slots in the horizontal position and transported eleven 3/8” sheets of 4’x8’ behind the Mule.  So easy and the Mule had no trouble at all on the one in seven hills.

Just discovered this morning that it was not so clever to leave the Arbtrolley loaded like this over the weekend as the foam filled tyres went flat and I could not move it by hand to hitch onto the Mule again.

Seems to have sorted themselves out after a bumpy trip. Boing! Boing! nearly lost some of the boards in the beginning!

[nepia]

On 12/07/2021 at 09:15, Billhook said:

Climate control, wipers, headlights, stereo Cd and radio, power steering, four wheel drive, diesel, heated and electric adjustable seats and windows but no instruments hence the price of £250 for the MOT failure.  Not many mowers have this spec!

 

 

Ever thought of going into sports field management?   😁

[Billhook]

On 22/07/2021 at 16:23, nepia said:

Ever thought of going into sports field management?   😁

Having decided that I needed another set of Greens gang mowers for the yard, I had a look on fleabay and there was a set going for not a lot but it was up in Northumberland.  I won the  set and when I collected them they had been used to mow a cricket field!  So the thought was there, but it soon went away.