Hi, I am Carolien and I am a Dutch woman trying to build a self sufficient homestead on concrete and rubble.
Follow my husband and me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@straverhomestead9667
Our small composter is full and we needed a new one. My husband has built a new and bigger one out of leftover wood we had sitting. He made it nice and sturdy with heavy lids, so the dogs can not get in there. The composter is about 1 x 2 meters and 1 meter high and very heavy, so we put it in place with a wheel loader. When the composter is full and the compost is ready to be turned over we will just lift the composter and set it aside to access the compost. As a finishing tough we made a wood chip pad to the composter, so we do not have to walk trough the mud.
Our oldest wants to help with the blog. He has his own kid’s camera and made pictures of what he is building on his playground. We had worked on our barn last year where he had helped his dad to lay bricks to close some holes in the wall. So now he is making “cement mortar” out of sand & water to build a “house with barn”.
He has a pile of stones to play and also some wood and he just starts to build. He started with the barn out of stone.
We had a job to clean out a yard and have all of these nice stones from that. The smaller ones he picked up with his wheelbarrow to build on.
Now he builds the fens against the barn and added 2 larger stones as a gate. He laid some wood over the walls as a roof and then added the wooden house behind the barn. The house was started with a round of wooden blocks and a higher back wall. Then he found a few boards screwed together and used that as walls and roof. The house has no door, but a small piece of house was added at the front.
After years of having to work with a leaking tractor, bad breaks and a not functioning hand throttle we had put our Fendt Farmer 103 SA into “retirement”. Somehow the workshop we brought our tractor to was unable to fix these problems. Now a few years later we had to use him for snowploughing and noticed a big problem. The hydraulic fluid was almost completely gone. So it was hard to steer and the front end loader hardly got of the ground. A few years back we moved into a different area and we have met someone who can repair our old tractor. So we made an appointment and brought our tractor to him.
It turned out that the seal between hydraulic pump and engine was leaking. All of the hydraulic fluid disappeared into the engine. This is obviously not good. We asked the mechanic to check the entire tractor and also look at the problems we had and see if he could repair them.
He took out the hydraulic pump and changed all the seals for new ones.
He also took out the 4-wheel-drive clutch and gave it new seals, because this was also leaking.
He adjusted the breaks.
The hand throttle turned out to be the easiest fix, because he just had to adjust the tension so the hand throttle would stay in the position you put it in.
Hand throttle
He also gave the connections between the different parts of the exhaust new seals. The tractor was always blowing out exhaust air out of every connection. Now there is now exhaust air leaking and the tractor is not as loud any more.
Because the hydraulic fluid was in the engine, he flushed the engine. So now there is only engine oil in the engine. Hydraulic fluid in the engine can cause problems and more rapid wear in the engine.
Also wile he was on it, he gave the tractor a complete service.
Now our tractor is back home again and we are so happy with the result. The tractor is as new. No more leaking, less noisy, a functioning hand throttle and the most important is good breaks. The tractor can actually stand still on a slope thanks to the functioning breaks.
Beautiful Chaos 