I know some of you guys have some good stories of mistakes you've made or seen pertaining to tractors.
Here's mine, I wish it could have caught on camera.
Here's some back story to help you visualize it.
I have a small ditch in my yard just outside of my fence. One side of the ditch is too steep to back up it and there is just enough room to do a Y-turn by it. The ditch is almost as wide as my 3240 tractor is long and it has about a 2 foot tapered wall made out of stacked rocks. It had about a foot of running water in it that day.
I was mowing and trying to hurry up so instead of driving along the fence to where I can easily do a U-turn I decided to do the Y-turn, this was shortly after I bought the 3240 and was still getting used to the foot controls. While when I wanted to back up I accidently hit the forward pedal sending me into the ditch, since the mower was engaged I instinctively floored the pedal so I wouldn't high center on the running mower and screw it up. I managed to loft the frontend in saving the mower and wedging the tractor about 6" up on both walls as it stopped. Surprisingly the landing and stop were pretty much impact free but the mower was doing a great job of sending water flying until I shut it down. A guy from down the street was driving by and saw the whole thing happen, he stopped and after he made sure I was ok we laughed about it for awhile. The tractor could move about 6" back and forth but it was obvious it couldn't just drive out. He helped me remove the rocks off of the bank in front of the tractor and I was able to wiggle the tractor around enough to get the rocks out from under the front tires too. The wall was still too steep to just drive out though, the mower deck would hang up big time. We were about ready to dig the wall down so it wasn't as steep but I figured an all out assault would work. I backed up the rock wall as far as I could until the tires would spin with the diff locked and tromped the forward pedal to the floorboards to get it to wheelie as the front end launched up the other wall. It carried the wheelie until the back tires hit the wall and the tractor drove/popped right out without dragging the mower deck. It worked like a charm. After laughing some more I drove up to the house, grabbed a few beers and then he helped restack the rocks we removed as we enjoyed a few cold ones.
We still laugh about it when he stops by to this day and I've never attempted to turn around there again... He stopped by this evening for a beer and reminded me about it. He still says it was impressive how well the tractor launched in so nicely and even more impressive how well it wheelied/launched back out of the ditch.
It was my only real screw up I've had, it was my bad but at least both the tractor and I survived damage free.
Even better I made a good friend because of this maneuver.
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So let's hear what you've seen or done that proves everyone is human and we all make mistakes.
