EEK - The backhoe almost burned up

As you are aware, I'm extending the roof of the hay shed by the corral. Well I need a dozen 2x6x16 boards for this. Rough cut ones are fine. Brother-in-law Ron has a nice little sawmill. Brother-in-law Glen was willing to give me a spruce log to be cut into boards, so on Sat morning I took my backhoe over to their places to get the log and have it cut up. One the way over, I noticed that the front bucket of the backhoe had more than a normal tilt to it. It is an old backhoe and the front bucket has always sagged a little bit on the left side, but this seemed more than normal. Any way, I got the log and carried it to the saw mill and Ron cut it up. He has a really cool little sawmill. In the end he made me 16 boards with very little waste.

We loaded the boards on to the backhoe (I had the front forks attached) and the sagging of the bucket looked worse. I mentioned this to Ron and we look and OH NO - the right boom arm of the front loader bucket had a MAJOR crack in it. It was about to break right off. I quickly unloaded the boards and took the hoe over to Glen who is a professional welder. Luckily he had time to weld it for me. Well as mentioned, this is an old hoe, and the fuel pump weeps diesel fuel. And it was dripping on the floor. As Glen welded on the machine I was watching the sparks to make sure the diesel on the floor didn't catch fire. Diesel doesn't burn like gas, so the danger was really not high. Suddenly though, fire erupted not on the floor, but up at the vicinity of the fuel pump on the side of the backhoe. I don't know how sparks managed to get up there, as it was on the opposite side of where Glen was welding. But it was burning there.

And it was a good little fire. I tried to blow on it (puff puff) - yea right. Glen handed me the air hose and I tried to use that to "blow out" the fire - nope - it was burning good - lots of oil and fuel on the machine at that location and the fire was spreading. You couldn't just pad it out with your gloves either - too many nooks and crannies. So we grabbed a fire extinguisher and put it out. "That is the first time I ever used a fire extinguisher in this shop in 30 years" Glen says. What a circus.

Luckily everything is metal around the pump and it didn't look like any damage was done - until I went to start the hoe again. I found out the cable that runs from the panel to the fuel pump was now frozen in place. I could not turn the fuel on and off at the pump. Well we found a way how I could still temporarily do it manually, but I don't know how I'm going to fix this cable as you cannot get to the screws that hold it to the pump. Life on the farm continues. I did get my boards though -so life is good.