You may remember the post I made about our little Fort Cri-Cri Super, trying to get the rotavator parted from the Power Take-Off  after it had obviously sat on it since the day it left the factory in 1998? Well, The Beast, as it is fondly known, had another surprise up its oily and rather grubby sleave. I’d always bemoaned the fact that as you rotavate, you need to walk through the lovely soil you’ve cultivated as the handles point backwards. Well, the arrival of the new cutter bar meant we had to rotate the handles somehow so that they pointed forwards, removing the very likely threat of neatly shearing the operator off at the calves by the cutter bars as the engine needed to be at the back with the cutterbar, as opposed to the front with the rotavator attachment.

Of course, I figured it was as easy as lifting the pin that kept the handles in place, un-hooking the clutch and accelerator cable, rotating the handles and snapping the pin back in place. How wrong could I have been. Common sense should have blinked into life – why would a PTO seize up after 16 years of neglect, yet a handle remain perfectly lubricated? Answer – it wouldn’t!

Of course, this time we knew what to do. First we must pull, really hard, on the handles, in a futile attempt to make them move. Then we must hit them a few times – hard enough to bruise the sides of our fists – followed by the swearing and cursing phase. That’s an important one – it helps a lot, with the pain. Finally, we must grab a large piece of wood, a lump hammer, and hit the proverbial out of the piece that won’t budge. Only once we’ve hammered through several pieces of 4″ x 4″ post, mangled our thumbs in the process, and removed much of the red paint from the metalwork, must we resort to the oxy-acetlylene torch that worked last time. Two minutes heating up the shaft with Clive, our tame ‘man-that-can-when-I-can’t’, and it was off. Obviously the preceding hours of me bashing it black and blue had loosened it enough to let the torch do its work.

A good papering with emery and some new grease and it’s back to new again. In the course of putting it all back together I discovered that the handlebars actually have several positions, offset from centre. The result is that next time I use it to rotavate (I have some headland to resow at some stage) I can stand to one side whilst doing so – ingenious!

So finally the cutterbar could go on, and we’re ready for the hay making!

The upside to owning this particular older 2-wheel tractor is that the manufacturer, Fort, is still going. Last year, once I had realised we’d bought a 2-wheel tractor rather than a one-trick-pony rotavator, I attempted to find a supplier of bits for it – accessories and so on. All to no avail – it’s an Italian manufacturer, and it was a struggle, really. This year, knowing it was a pain to find someone last year to cut our hay, I sat at the computer even longer, searching for someone who could help and lo and behold, since last summer a new UK dealer had cropped up! Even better still, they’re head office is not far from us – Rapid Tractors at Tutbury! It turns out our little Cri-Cri Super is the old version of the new Serie 280, and all the parts fit! Our motor might struggle with something like the baler, but at a few thousand pounds it can rest well, knowing it will never be asked to power one! Hence the new cutterbar – 122cm of pure evil teeth – can’t wait to get stuck in!