Cutting Donna's hayfield

Cutting Donna's hayfield didn't go as planned.  I thought I'd be done now.  But no, the tractor started acting up by 4 pm.  The same thing.  Or actually worse as I lost more RPMs today and therefore a loss of more power.  Sometimes the RPMs went up.  It didn't do that before.   So my putting in a new fuel filter and fuel strainer did not work.  The loss of RPMs seems like a loss of diesel. 

I took an hour break and then tried again.  It wasn't long before the RPMs started to go down again.

Donna and I called a few people and then looked on the internet.  One of the reasons for a loss of RMP speed is the tractor's fuel injectors could be dirty or bad.  So we went to Walmart and bought a Lucas fuel injector cleaner.  I added the rest of diesel I had in a container and the fuel injector cleaner.

Things seemed better.  I made one row cutting fine.  On the second row cutting the RPMs briefly went down for a short time.  On the third row cutting it got worst.  After taking a few breaks I finally finished the third row cutting and called it over for the day.

On the way home I saw Larry outside on his driveway.   He thought I may have something in my fuel tank and that was getting in the way of the fuel leaving the tank to go to the engine.  He had that happen to him on one of his vehicles in the past.  He had to have the fuel tank cleaned and they found part of a rubber gasket in the tank.   In my case, when the John Deere dealership worked on my fuel gage problem they also checked the fuel sending unit in the fuel tank.  They may have let something fall into the tank and that is causing my problem.

This problem started a few days ago.  Each time it happened in the afternoon after hours of working fine.  Of course each time I would fill the fuel tank each morning as I didn't know how much fuel was in it.  I know the fuel tank wasn't empty as each time I didn't have to add more than a partial tank of fuel.

Tomorrow I will add more diesel and see if that will allow me to finish cutting Donna's field. I think I got half of her field cut already.  Monday I can ask a repair shop if they can "clean" my fuel tank.

If it isn't one thing, it is another.  Since my head injury and near death, the world I came back too is strange.

A view of Donna's field when things were working fine.