What’s in our tractor toolbox
Behind the seat of our Kubota L5030 tractor is a steel toolbox. It’s not much to look at – especially because I didn’t clean it up for the photos below – but it’s come in handy often and worth a mention here on the blog. I’m pretty sure most tractors of this size have one so even if you’re looking at something other than a Kubota, this could be of interest to you.
We have come to realize that we need various tools at odd times when our tack room and workshop aren’t close by. Some tools are important for regular tractor operation and others come in handy when working with implements or on fences and pasture structures.
Inside the box:
- Big hammer – 2 lb. – useful for encouraging heavy bolts and tractor implements (like the bush hog and post hole digger).
- Rag – lots of greasy bits on tractors so having a rag handy is important
- Vice grips – different sized nuts and bolts and some of them are stubborn
- Lots of extra pins – a variety of nut and bolt pins exist on our tractor and sometimes they’re damaged or lost. These are cheap so we stock up.
- Adjustable spud wrench – that’s the adjustable wrench in the photo above with the long pointy end. The pointy end is used often, usually to tighten the adjustable chain that holds the hay spear onto the bucket.
- Multi-sized wrench – there isn’t room to carry every wrench size so it’s good to have an adjustable one. Because you sometimes need two wrenches, one for a bolt, one for a nut, it’s good to have more than one and/or the vice grips previously mentioned.
- Multi-tool – we use a multi-tool you can put in your pocket that can unfold into a pair of needle-nose pliers. It also has various screwdriver heads and a knife. Folded it fits easily in the toolbox.
As nice as the toolbox is, it’s not air or watertight so it gets dirty quickly. I can’t store my phone or anything made of paper (like a manual) in there.
If you’re planning on having a tractor, I recommend assembling some useful tools and keeping them with you on the tractor. If for some reason yours doesn’t have a toolbox, perhaps you can find a way to attach one. Trust me, you’re going to need some of these at one point or another.
We ignored the advice from our farm friends about buying a two wheel drive tractor for our small horse farm. To this day, they still tell us it’s a waste of money but we think otherwise. Our east Tennessee land gets pretty muddy and it only takes a little bit of rain to make it slick. If we planned on using this tractor any time other than when it was completely dry, we would have been out of luck with 2wd. 4wd isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity where we live and our 4WD Kubota with locking rear differential is serving us well. Here’s a short video (1:24 minutes) showing some examples of why we needed a 4wd tractor:
One of the first things we wanted to or needed to do with our new tractor is to move hay and it’s one of the reasons we used to justify having a tractor. Our round bale experiment was successful and now we feed mostly round hay bales to our horses throughout winter. Until now we’ve been pulling our car hauler full of round bales into our muddy pasture and then pushing a round bale off as needed. Now that we have a four wheel drive tractor, it was time to put it to work. But we needed one more thing: a hay spear. Unfortunately our tractor doesn’t have a quick-disconnect bucket. We could buy a hay spear implement for the arms but it would be a pain to unbolt and remove the bucket each time we needed a bale. While we do plan to convert our arms to use a quick-connect system, it’s a bit of a hassle up front. We’d need to buy a system and then have someone weld a bracket to our bucket. For now, we’ve opted to use a spear that connects to our bucket. We found a nice used setup on Craigslist that attaches in a way that spreads the load across a good portion of the bucket to minimize bending and yesterday we got to test it out. I’ll need some practice but it went well (see pic). At 800 or so pounds, having a bale up high like that makes the tractor a little unsteady. I left the bush hog on the rear for counterweight and lowered the bale when I cleared my trailer.
