Heeeeere's Johnny

It seems the Wisconsin Dell's Plague of 2011 is finally starting to leave us.  I don't think any of us is completely rid of all the symptoms, but things are starting to get back to normal.  Although both have a bit of a cough still, N and L were back up to their normal energy levels yesterday, which was really hard on C and I, who are still a couple days behind them in our recovery.  Although even today we are still not up to full speed, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

In spite of feeling miserable, I did muster the energy to venture out of the house yesterday morning to look at a riding lawn mower.  When we moved to our new house, I tried to rationalize getting a riding mower but, on paper, our yard just wasn't big enough to justify it.  However, as I've improved the creek and the opposing creek bank, the area that I mow has grown.  Every time I mowed last summer I was thinking how nice it would be to have a rider to help speed things up.  Of course, not just any riding lawn mower would do.  After seeing a old John Deere 110 at a tractor show last summer, I became intrigued with the idea of using one as a "working" tractor. 

And so the search began.  There was lots to learn, from was it even practical to use, to what things do you watch out for, to what is a good price for a given condition.  My search took a temporary hiatus when I found my Caterpillar tractor and started working on it, but as the snow started to melt, I began thinking about spring and the riding mower again.  What I didn't expect was for my search for the "right" one to be so short.  I had surfed craigslist and Ebay just to get a feel for what was out there, but hadn't made any serious inquiries.  Then while I was sitting up waiting for N's fever to break Thursday night, a 1966 model 110 popped up locally. 

I called the seller, and yesterday morning I went to look at the tractor in person.  The seller seemed to really take alot of pride in "Johnny" as he called it, but was moving to a condo and didn't need a mower anymore.  It had been restored a few years ago, but used on a regular basis for mowing, so it wasn't pristine.  He had traded another guy some stuff for some pulling wheels and tires, and put them on Johnny just for decoration.  The rear pulling tires proved impractical for mowing, but the fronts worked OK so he left those on.  It seemed almost too coincidental that my main attraction to the 110 was it's similarity to the 4010, 4020 and 6030 my grandpa had, and here this even had yellow rear rims and aluminum front rims like grandpa ran on his 4010 puller.  Nostalgia aside, I made a thorough run through my checklist, drove it around a while, and everything checked out.  We pretty quickly came to terms on a price, and Johnny was mine. 

What I didn't expect was this deal to quickly turn into a case of getting more than I bargained for, literally.  While the aluminum front rims look neat, I really wanted stock front rims. The seller said he had a set of stock rims, and was willing to include those in the deal.  The rims he had, however, were installed on another tractor chassis he had stored out back.  By the time we got Johnny loaded into my truck, the seller had gone from offering to trade the stock rims for the aluminum ones, to just giving me the whole other tractor for the rims and any other parts I wanted off of it.  Not only that, he decided to save himself the hassle of moving all his remaining miscellaneous tractor parts to his new place, he'd give me those too.  I really wasn't looking to get into the tractor parts business, but I'm always willing to offset a toy purchase with a little reselling.  Now I just need to get to where I feel well enough to get out into the garage and start working on some of this stuff again.