A good reason to not borrow

My brother told me today of a situation one of our neighbors got into this last weekend...

They borrowed a tractor, kick baler (NH, not sure of model) and kick wagon from another neighbor to make some small squares that they owed a friend of ours. They hire out their own hay for big squares, and don't have any equipment to really make dry hay.

Apparantly they slashed a tire on the tractor on a fence post. A good $1000 later that's fixed, but then they ran a 6" fence post into the baler, basically totaling it out....

One figure I heard, is $6000 to make about 180 or so bales of hay.... and now there is the distinct possibility of the rest of the fence being in some of the hay. Don't know how goats fair with wire in their hay, but it can't be quite as bad as a cow. Glad it wasn't me...

Donovan from Wisconsin

LOL. Reminds me of a friend who borrowed an old NI
mower I had. He busted a housing that was part of
the mechanical pickup for the bar. Never did find
another one....

A so called friend borrowed a elevator once.
nothing wrong with it at all.came back with the
bottom casting broke, from turning with the lift
arms in the wrong position. he lied to me and said
it was that way when he picked it up. well he's
wrong and still cheats people.

Shakespeare had it right in his play. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" This is a truth not only for money but just about anything. Equipment really fits this saying.

When I was starting out I had to borrow things sometimes. I always made sure that what I borrowed was in as good of shape or even better when I returned it. Usually it was cheaper in the long run to just do without or buy my own.

I could borrow a worn out piece of crap and it would break down. So I was stuck fixing it to work again. So why fix the other guy's junk for a little use??? Fix my OWN junk for my later use.

I DO NOT lend out anything now. If a friend or neighbor asks to use something the usage will include my self or my sons running it. The friend/neighbor gets his job done and I get my equipment back in the condition it left in.

I have seen too many things wrecked and then the borrower does a half a$$ed repair. The owner gets a lower valued piece of equipment back.

Last thing I ever loaned was a manure spreader. I had a almost brand new spreader. A good customer had his break down. He came and borrowed mine to get his manure hauled while the ground was clear and froze. He returned it and parked it in the shed. I did not look at it for a week or so when I needed it next. I always look in a spreader to check if it is clear before using it. The spreader had a block of ICE 6 feet square and a foot thick on top of the augers. The flighting was folded back on two of the three augers. The rearer beaters had several blades broken clear off the tube. This is on a spreader that had maybe hauled 20 loads of manure when he picked it up. I called the guy up and asked him to come over. He tried to tell me that it was that way when he got the spreader. When that did not fly he then said I had used it after he had brought it back. I showed him the tracks in the shed floor where his pickup was the last thing to be hooked to the spreader. I gave him two choices. 1) Pay for all new parts to be put in the spreader. I meant all new parts not just some paddles welded on and the flighting cut out and replaced. I meant new augers and new beaters. 2)OR He bought the spreader for what I had given for it.

After a heated discussion he bought the spreader. He still has the spreader. It looks like total junk now and barely works.

So that was the end of anyone using my equipment. My sons or me. No one else.

"A good reason not to borrow" works the other way too. A few years ago,I only had a push mower and was bemoaning the fact that I had a ton of leaves to rake. My BIL said, Come and get my lawn tractor, It has a bagger on it and it won't take you long to get up those leaves. So I hauled it home and spent a good half day working on it before I dared to even try to use it. I had to remove and hammer out hanger brackets, make adjustments on almost everything. I don't see how he even mowed with it! Next year I just went and bought a couple new leaf rakes!

Must have been a JUNK baler!

$6000 - $1000 for the tire leaves $5000. My neighbor"s new DEERE baler cost some $50,000.

Doesn"t QUITE add up!

I never have too much worry about nieghbours coming to borrow stuff from me. They would all call my equipment junk, as for the most part,it is older stuff. And that is just fine with me, and any of my equipment that people might want to borrow, I would probably be in need of that piece at that time too. I don't do custom work, and I don't borrow. If I need to, I hire someone in with thier equipment, but I hate buying equipment for them... so I go out an hunt down my own. I agree with JD seller, Shakespear was right , never a borrower or a lender be! Bruce

Amen

I had a friend borrow a weed eater that had blades for light brush, he brought it back in pieces and proceeded to tell me it was junk! The gall of some people

Small square baler isn't that much even brand new.

I used to borrow tractors and implements from my neighbors for a few once every five year jobs, while I was still building my line up. They were a little shy on their maintenance and were very happy to have their stuff get some. I have noticed though, that views on borrowing and lending change in direct proportion to how much stuff you own. I had a new neighbor move in years ago, when I was just getting started, he was probably 15 years older than me. I asked one day about borrowing a tractor, and he told me that he used to borrow then got to thinking about the potential liability in it. That is certainly an important consideration, but the bigger factor was that just a few years earlier he had gotten to where he could afford his own, so now borrowing/lending are evil to him. I still loan something out once in a great while but I am judicious about it. The worst a piece ever came back was when I loaned it to someone who was very critical of borrowers.

I was sitting in the break area a long time ago talking how i needed to borrow a chain saw. One of the guys spoke up and said " You would stand a better chance of borrowing my WIFE than borrowing my chain saw"
I knew where he stood on borrowing stuff....

I borrowed a tractor and plow once and the plow sheer broke.
The friend told me it,was already cracked and he took care of
it. I had told him I would pay for it or fix it, basically I told him I
would do whatever was necessary to make it right. He took
care of it and I never herd anything I also could borrow again
from him again anytime. I gave another friend a couple of
pounds of r-12 and a recovery unit. I never expect anything
back, and that is fine with me. I have certain people I borrow
with all the time and we never have problems. We all trust
each other that if it broke from misuse it will be made right one
way or another, sometimes I make out good, sometimes I
have to fix something I did not break. It all evens out for us. On
the other hand I did give a friends brother a brand new
craftsman torque wrench that never came back. He is not on
the borrowers trusted list.

Below are alot of good reasons to not borrow/lend
equipment.If it breaks the borrower will always claim it was a POS ready to breakdown and the lender will claim it was a like new piece of equipment that would have never broken down.

I share JD Sellers viewpoint.

I do not loan/borrow equipment, but am more than happy to come over with the equipment and help. My neighbors are also good about this and provide equipment with operators when I need it.

What a mess! Like most others who posted, I just do not lend
out my things or borrow from others for this very reason.

(quoted from post at 01:54:05 08/23/13) Must have been a JUNK baler!

$6000 - $1000 for the tire leaves $5000. My neighbor"s new DEERE baler cost some $50,000.

Doesn"t QUITE add up!

Click to expand...

Well, I never said it was a brand new baler, and around these parts, $5000 can buy you a really nice 15 year old baler with a kicker on it.

Quite frankly, I don't really care what your buddy spent on a brand new deere, because it's got nothing to do with my post.

Donovan from Wisconsin

A new small squre baler can cost over $30,000 dollars. Good used small square balers often go for over $10,000. I sold a NH 570 used baler for $9,500 and it was not mint.

I wonder what kind of a hay meadow would have all that junk in it. Sounds like he was baling in some old barnyard or junk yard. He would have wrecked his own baler. How did he mow and rake it and not see all the junk?

(quoted from post at 22:54:05 08/22/13) Must have been a JUNK baler!

$6000 - $1000 for the tire leaves $5000. My neighbor"s new DEERE baler cost some $50,000.

Doesn"t QUITE add up!

Click to expand...

Who said the replacement baler had to be NEW?

I don't know where you're from but generally you can buy a pretty decent used baler for $5000.

Uggh,


Makes you wonder what they all wrecked to get the hay cut in the first place. I"ve owned a variety of mowers, haybines, and a discbine. None of them could cut down fence posts and wire and put them in a nice windrow, much less do it without the operator noticing some very bad things happening.

Guess you can be happy they weren"t in your yard asking to borrow.

All I run is hay ground and I have built a nice lineup of hay equipment over the years. I will do some custom work, but am fussy about it. I turn a lot down and won"t borrow out. Biggest problem is most of the people that have asked to borrow my stuff have no clue how to run or maintain it and what they are wanting to do with it aint worth doing anyway. BW

(quoted from post at 20:24:51 08/22/13) Don't know how goats fair with wire in their hay, but it can't be quite as bad as a cow.

Click to expand...

Most goats will spit it out. Cows seem to enjoy killing themselves with it.

And people say goats are dumb?

When I had a shop in town, guys would stop all the time a want to borrow my car trailer. The trailer weighs 2,000 pounds empty.

I'd ask them what they had to tow it with, and they'd maybe have an old van with a fishing boat hitch. I'd tell them to forget it.

I finally set a policy that if someone needed something hauled, I'd haul it for them for a price, but I wouldn't loan or rent my trailer out.

I do not borrow anything I can not afford to replace if things go south real bad. I do not loan anything unless I do not care if I get it back. Last several years I have taken a lot fewer TUMS.

I honestly don't know how they managed to get it windrowed without noticing it first, but they do have a few (dumb) hired hands so who knows. It was an area where a local trucking/excavatiing company is stacking soil and rock, debris, whatever. Don't know if they bulldozed the old fence rows, or what.

I saw them go by 2x to rake it. 1st time was a rotary rake behind their M (possibly to ted it) and then the next day they used another nieghbors tractor and wheel rake. Could be when they pulled stuff into the windrow.

Nobody ever asks to use our baler, we still stack on the wagon and that's just too much work for everybody... Kinda like to keep it that way. One benefit to haveing mostly older equipment.

Donovan from Wisconsin

I bought a new cement mixer several years ago. An aquaintance apparently saw it. A week later he hit me up to borrow it, before I had even used it. I hated to turn him down. Two weeks later he still haden't brought it back, I called him and he said I will bring it back day after tomorrow. The day after that he brought it back and as we were unloading it he ask me when I would be through with it. It was caked with concrete to the point you couldn't tell what color it was. I beat all of it that I could out with a hammer and eventually had it sandblasted to clean it up. Don't ask me to borrow anything and I will treat you with the same respect.

I had a retired neighbor who borrowed my stuff all the time, always brought it back in good shape.

Came home one afternoon from work in town, and my baler looked like a yard sale at his place. Stopped by, and it had broken a tooth on the main gear, the one where the plunger hit the hay in the chamber on every revolution of the flywheel. He hadn't hit anything, was just baling along, and it quit. He babied everything, so I knew he hadn't abused it.

He was a retired mechanic, and his friend was a retired welder/fabricator. They had built up the gear tooth with weld, then ground it down to where the only way you could tell it from another tooth was some blue from the heat. He wouldn't take a nickel for the job- he said "You got two old guys off their sofas and doing something that made them feel useful again- I should pay you for the opportunity."

A better neighbor there never was- other things include putting my family up for 4 days after a blizzard (we'd have froze to death, because we didn't have any auxiliary heat in our mobile, and couldn't drive anywhere because of the snow). And euthanizing, burying and making a little headstone for our dog while we were at Disneyland. Neighbors like that are hard to find- RIP Charlie Faith.

Main reason I never borrow anything is I keep my own stuff torn up most of the time. No time to fix anybody else's.

Had a big oak go down and borrowed FIL"s chainsaw (as I didn"t have one then) to cut it up for HIM as he heated with wood. Sent it back clean, with an unused new chain and a new sharpening file. Couple months later, he borrowed my trailer to haul the wood to his home. Returned it with 1 safety chain and the 7 pin connector damaged to the point of needing replaced from dragging on the road. I fixed it, said nothing, and don"t borrow/lend for any reason.

While I posted one earlier, I didn't think about
the time a guy I used to work with asked to borrow
a mower and tractor to mow his daughter's pasture.
What I didn't know at the time was that the
pasture (sic) was a solid mass of multiflora rose.
Both front tires were flat the morning after he
brought the tractor back, and one rear was half
down a couple of days later. The second rear went
flat a couple of weeks later. In all, it cost me
about $1500 to let him cut that four acre field.
When I asked him if he was interested in at least
chipping in for the repairs, the SOB said the
tires were that way when he got the tractor.
Never again.....

I was going to ask, after the passes from cutting, tedding and or raking, how the post got in there.

A few years back I did all the tedding and raking for the farmer I was helping, 150 acres or so, so much at a time, one field a house was built in the middle of it, so we just cut as close as was possible, apparently there was a firewood stack, haphazardly placed and been there awhile, few stray pieces, well I had raked one piece into the windrow and the farmers son caught it with the 315 NH, but was able to stop in time, and clear it, good practice to watch that pick up. That darned outer windrow, in these kinds of fields are best baled last, seems the perimeters can and may have things in them, from hedgerows or who knows. I don't like fields I have not been in, say during the off season, have walked or driven around on, there is something to be said for "knowing" the fields you work in. At our other place we had some nice boulders projecting, and they were a pain, I always marked them out, every year, til finally we had an excavator on hand a nice new case EX 70 or whatever, with a thumb, one of the first things I did was to remove all of them, no more trashed mower blades and the worry about marking them before the grasses grew too tall.

I try to approach the borrowing/lending area with the same approach my uncle had:

"If you want to borrow my equipment, that must mean you can"t affort to buy your own - and if you can"t affort to buy your own, that means you couldn"t affort to replace mine if you tear it up!"

I don't borrow often but if I do it's from one close neighbor I've worked with for the last 35 years. When I return whatever I borrow I make sure it's cleaned, greased and full of fuel if needed, has a new blade in it or whatever. If something breaks the broken part is replaced with a new one at my expense. His machinery is always well maintained and I make sure it's still well maintained when I return it. He has an investment in that machinery and I don't intend to freeload off of his investment. Jim

Dad has always done mechanic work. Dads friend had a car that needed repair, and asked to borrow one of Dads. We lived near Sioux City, found out the friend had driven to Omaha over the weekend. I remember Dad mentioning to me how ballsy that move was, without asking him what he thought of it! Helped form my opinion of borrowing stuff! He wont ask to borrow my carpentry tools, because he knows I need them!

Great subject for most of us, I think we've all been on both ends!
I borrowed an implement from a friend, he didn't use it much and
it had one tire that went flat. He aired it up and told me it would
last for the time I had it.
Cool, but since I borrowed it, I took the tire off, cleaned up the rim
put a boot in the tire and put it back on before I returned it.
He was astounded. Returned in better shape than when borrowed.
I thought it was only fair. He wouldn't take any money for "rent".

On the flip side, I loaned my snow plow truck to a family member.
(worst mistake ever is loaning to family)
He was at least nice enough to park it in front of my shop and tell
me he broke it.
This was a Meyer plow rig, factory built, nothing custom about it.
He had hit something so hard it tore the steel mounting brackets
that held it to the truck frame.
I had to unbolt the entire thing from the truck frame, straighten it
all out, weld it back up and put it back on to fix it.
Suppose he would even help with the labor?
Nah, he was finished with his drive for that snowfall.
He didn't plow mine on his way out, or in either.