Busted Bearing

The snow is gone and it's not raining and the ground has dried out enough to continue excavation.  All is good and we are going great guns moving many cubic meters of dirt each day.  Then it happens.  A crunching, clanking sound from the B21 tractor.  At first we though it was a bad universal joint.  We knew we had a bad U-joint and even had gone ahead and purchased a replacement.  We just had not yet installed it.  No more procrastination.  We installed the new U-joint the next day.  Feeling clever we rolled out our tractor with its shiny new universal joint only to be instantly disappointed when the grinding, crunching sound persisted.  Yes we needed a new U-joint, but apparently our problem went deeper.  After much disassembly we finally identified our problem as a failed ball bearing in one of the front gear boxes.  This is not a simple quick fix.  We are going to be down for a while waiting for the parts.

We had to disassemble the entire front axle of the tractor.

If you use a log as a jack stand - You might be a redneck.

This is the gear box which contained the failed bearing.