Making Do

There is a fine balance between making do with what's available on the farm (scrap lumber, scrap metal, miscellaneous parts, tires, hoses, bolts, etc.) and going to town to get the right thing for the job. Earlier in the season (ha! it's only April and I'm already talking about "earlier in the season") I had this vision to use what was on the farm. So when something broke down or needed replacing, I would fix it or replace it with the available material laying around the place. I just needed to find it. That works in some cases - nuts and bolts and general purpose things - but not all.

For example, just yesterday, I needed to replace a tire on the International seed drill. It was a 6.70-15 with a 4-hole rim. There's just about 2 of everything on the farm - 2 Case 1030s (one for parts), 2 (actually 3) Noble blades, 2 swathers (again, one for parts) - so it was just a matter of searching around for the right tire and rim. I found a handful of 6.70-15 tires on 5-hole rims, but no 4-hole rims. I could take the tire into town to swap it out with the bad tire or keep searching around. I decided to take the found tire and the right rim into town. Conrad Tire ended up putting a new tire on anyway, since the tire I found was shot as well. I guess what I'm learning here is, though it's seems like a good idea to make do with what's available, time, especially in early spring, is far more precious to me than the $45 I had to part with to get the new tire mounted on the 4-hole rim. Maybe in that perfect world where everything was organized on the farm according to size and purpose, I could make do the majority of the time, but the reality is far different. It's hard enough during a typical busy day to put tools away (what other things are easier to organize than tools?), let alone put used tires in their proper place or store pieces of scrap metal in some relevant pile. Toss it on the pile, throw it in the farm yard, and go to town where order reigns.