Introducing my C-125

[Crazy_Carl 254]

Here's a video I know that most of you will enjoy.  It's about my '84 C-125 I bought used from a Toro Wheel Horse Dealership for $1050 when I was 17.  That's almost 12 years ago.  It's had some different deck configurations and small things done to it over the years like different tires, cup holder, new seat, tail lights, 48" side discharge deck front mounted, 42" rear discharge deck, snowplow, and one of my favorites is my homemade 5 gallon bucket holder.  This is the tractor that I mow my yard with now and I used to mow the grass around my Dad's barns at his farm with it too.  This winter I did a bunch of work to this tractor.  I repaired my front pivot plate, installed a new front pivot pin, spindles, clutch pulley, front tires, voltmeter.  I re-wired the tractor and cleaned up the harness.  I had my front rims powder coated and I installed new wheel bearings and dust caps.  I also bought and installed the missing firewall and bracket for the belt guard that this tractor never came with.  The good ole K301 was getting low on compression so I had it rebuilt and in the video I start it up for the first time.

 

Wheel Horse C-125 First / Cold Start After Rebuild and Tractor Overview

 

Edited March 17, 2018 by Crazy_Carl

[dells68 7,494]

Very nice Carl!  Love the video of the one armed bandit mowing with it.  Bet that arm felt better when you got that horse!

[classiccat 548]

Nice Blackhood Carl and great video!  

 

Your shakedown run with the bum-wing was definitely some bonus footage!

[PeacemakerJack 10,669]

Great video and awesome history with that old black hood.  It is great to see another generation appreciating, using, and maintaining these wonderful old machines.  

 

Now that uou have his video out out there with the bum wing—you have to tell us on he forum, what did you do to your arm?  There’s always a story...

[19richie66 16,857]

Well he is “Crazy Carl”. Might be a good story behind it.   Nice tractors by the way.

[Crazy_Carl 254]

I'm glad you guys like my video.  When I bought this tractor if was shortly after a near tragic accident and buying this nice ole black hood definitely picked my spirits up and help get my mind off of some bad things going on in my life.

 

In the video clip at the tail end I was suffering from some temporary nerve damage so I had my arm in that sling so it wasn't just dangling all around.  Here's the story.  It's a long one.

 

On a beautiful day in early may of 2006, I hopped in my '86 GMC 3/4T RWD 350CI with a holley carburetor, thrush glass packs and a four speed, drove to my buddy's house after school and get some good food in town and we didn't eat lunch at school in preparation for this.  I had just turned 17 a few weeks prior.  When I got to his house he was shaving for his new job at Burger King and while he was shaving his neck he asked me "Carl if I were to accidentally slit my throat open right now what would you do?"  I said" I don't know, probably call 911."  We went upstairs to his room to get his football so we could play a little catch before we went to go get food.  He hopped on his computer to check his MySpace.  I was looking out his bedroom window at my truck that I had for about a week now and I was imagining all the great future adventures my best friend and I were about to have in it when I turned around to the sight of him waving his 20 gauge Mossberg 500 across his room and when it was pointed in the general direction of my heart, I heard a very loud bang.  My ears were ringing and I was overwhelmed with the smell of gun smoke.  Time stood still for a moment, as I looked at the wall behind me and didn't see a hole in it.  I turned my head around, looked at Ryan and realized that I was hit in my left shoulder.  Next thing I knew I was down on the floor in between a wall and couch with blood gushing out of my left shoulder.  I quickly realized judging by the sound of the round and how it hit me that I was hit with a deer slug at point blank range in a vital area of the body and I'm going to be dead very soon.  I was shocked that I was alive and awake for this whole ordeal.  Ryan called 911 and they instructed him to put pressure on the wound.  The pain from this pressure was terrible.  My left arm was numb and I couldn't move it.  It felt almost as if it was shot off.  My lung somehow got punctured by the slug so my lungs were filling with blood and I felt like I was drowning in my own blood.  The back of my t-shirt was completely wet and soaked from my blood and it is the absolute worst feeling of panic laying in a pool of your own blood knowing from your deer hunting experience that I don't have long to live and I'm going to die.  No one should have to experience this feeling ever.  It's the worst.  It felt like forever but a Sheriff arrived, took a quick look at the gun, and then moved Ryan and the couch aside, knelt over me and put pressure on the wound.  He kept asking me my name and address and I kept thinking "can't you just look at the I.D. in my wallet". I here that's how they try to keep you conscious.  I told him that Ryan shot me by accident and asked him I was going to die.  He said that the paramedics would be here soon with oxygen and I'll be fine.  I heard some more radio chirping in the background and the paramedics came up with a backboard and oxygen.  They put the oxygen mask over my face and I went out like a light.

 

This happened on a Wednesday afternoon after school.  I have really scattered foggy memories of the next four days and I really didn't come back to full consciousness until Monday morning.  What happened during these four days has been told to me by friends and relatives.  I was Mercy Flighted (helicoptered) to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester.  I "died" a couple of times on the helicopter ride to the Hospital.  Workers in the ER really didn't think I was going to make it.  The paramedics report estimated that I lost at least a liter of blood.  The surgeon quickly got to work.  The round was fired so close to me that the surgeon took the wad out of the wound.  The miracle thing is the main artery and vein that went through my shoulder from my heart to my left arm were intact.  If those were damaged that likely would've been it for me.  Instead the surgeon had to repair a lot of smaller arteries and veins that were damaged.  He didn't get all of the lead out for fear of causing more damage.  To this day the x-ray of my left shoulder is pretty scary looking and you can see pieces of bone and slug fragments in there.  During this time a lot of people came to visit me at the Hospital but I have little to no memory of them.  I remember someone saying "your sister's here."  She quickly flew up from Georgia where she lives to see that I was alive and doing okay.  My ex girlfriend and some friends visited me but I have no memory of them or the things I said to them.  I was swelled up like a balloon from all the fluids put in my body and I was very foggy from all of the different medications put into my body.  I had a dream where I woke up, tried to rip every tube and sensor out of my body, and get out of there.  My Dad and the nurses had restrain me.  It turns out that was real but it felt so much like a dream when it happened.  I had another dream during this time where I was being pulled into some light by an angel figure.  Was this real or not?  I really don't know because my memories are so foggy of this time.  My Dad got really upset at my best friend's step dad and told him that we could never be friends again and mainly blamed him for all of this.

 

When I fully came to it Monday morning I still had my left arm but I couldn't move it.  I had sensors connected to me, a vacuum pump draining the fluid in my left shoulder, and a couple of drainage tubes inserted into my left lung and every time I coughed, nasty red stuff would come out.  Doctors told me that most of the nerve damage is temporary but there will be some permanent problems.  The surgeon had to cut out half of my left clavicle out to do his repair work.  On Wednesday I was blinking and noticed something off with my right eye.  When I closed my left eye I couldn't see much out of my right eye.  I only have a pie slice of peripheral vision in that eye to this day and you can notice it if you look at my eyes in the video that they're looking at different places.  The doctors told me that because I lost so much blood, your body shuts things off to conserve blood.  Unfortunately the blood got shut off to my dominant right eye and the optical nerve cells didn't make it.  I was very bummed out that I'd never have depth perception again, shot a gun right handed/right eyed again, or look someone right in the eyes again.   I was very disappointed that I couldn't drive my stick shift truck.  I was in the PICU for 7 days.  The doctors sealed up the would then moved me to the adolensent unit for another 7 days.  It was this point in my life when I realized how much my Dad who had to travel a lot for work so he was frequently not home and often not home on my Birthday loved me.  He was always by my side in the hospital and only left a couple of times to grab a shower and fresh clothes.  He and the steady flow of visitors I had provided me with a lot of comfort.

 

I was released from the hospital and missed the rest of that school year.  I had a tutor help me so I could pass my final exams and move on to my Senior year seamlessly.  One day over the summer after this I was laying in bed and I could just twitch my left thumb.  This was a great sign in an otherwise terrible summer.  Ryan lived with his Dad senior year and went to a different school.  At the beginning of my senior year my left arm would just lay on my desk and not move a lot.  By the end of senior year it was moving more naturally like an arm would.  The physical therapy was very painful to get the range of motion back in my left arm.  It took years to get the strength back in that arm and the sense of touch back in my left hand so I could pick up heavy things and thread small nuts and bolts with my left hand.  Before this accident happened I wanted to be a carpenter but not having my left arm changed my career outlook. 

 

Ryan plead guilty to a second degree assault charge and had to serve 60 days in jail for this.  Looking back we were both so reckless with our firearms and I just as easily could have done this same thing to him.  I wish I had talked to the DA and lowered the charge to a misdemeanor and Ryan could have done community service instead.  At the time I really blamed him for what happened and why my life sucked so much immediately afterwards.  I loved shooting my guns, working with my hands, and driving my stick shift truck and this ruined all of that for me.  Eventually, my arm came back pretty well.  My left deltoid muscle still doesn't work and is numb so I can't fully raise my left arm all the way up like my right but this isn't something that I notice a lot anymore.  I converted gradually to shooting left handed which limits my firearm selection a little but I am enjoying the hobby again.  I sold the guns I had after this accident but around the time I was 20 I bought a left handed savage .22LR bolt action and got back into the hobby again.  Five years went by without talking to Ryan and one day I received a friend request on Facebook from him.  I didn't think much of it at the time and promptly accepted. He messaged me right away asking how I was doing and wanted to meet up somewhere and catch up.  This was a pretty awkward meeting.  He had a son and a steady girlfriend.  Our lives seemed pretty different.  Some months went by and he split up with his girlfriend.  We were both a couple of single guys in our early 20s with time on our hands so we started hanging out, going on adventures,  and going out to bars together.  It felt awkward just at first, but we soon became best friends again and it felt just like old times.  We're still best friends and I just hung out with him yesterday and we shoot guns together every now and then.  His family is forever grateful that we became best friends again.  It really helped ease his guilty conscious and helped take away the dark cloud that loomed over my head regarding this whole ordeal and helped turned me into a happy confident young man.  We had a couple beers together one night and had a man-to-man talk about this.  That's when I realized just how much of an accident this situation was.  He never meant to point the gun at me and pull the trigger. He was just waving it across the room and pulled the trigger at the worst time.  The gun almost jumped out of his hands.  He has no clue how that deer slug ever got into the chamber of his gun.  He normally kept it unloaded behind his bedroom door.  He always tells me if he could trade places with me he would, but while what I went through was bad, I wouldn't want to trade places with him and live with the guilt of nearly killing my 17 year old best friend either.

 

After high school I went to RIT for one year as a mechanical engineering major, dropped out to go work full time at my uncle's machine building business I grew up working for, but when I was 21 I started a job as an overhead crane and hoist service technician.  I learned and saw a lot during my 5 years at this job, but one great thing about it was the physical rigors of the job really helped strengthen my left arm so I didn't feel so weak anymore.  One day I met a gentlemen at a factory that taught Hunter's Safety courses in the area where I lived and he asked me to come guest speak and tell this story at his courses.  I have been doing so for about the past five years and the people in the audience really stay tuned to every word of this story and it really drives home the point of why you should treat every gun as if its loaded, know your target and beyond and never point it at anything you don't intend to shoot.  Ryan and I went through that hunter's safety course and thought something like this could never happen to us.  We thought that if we knew the gun was unloaded we could point it at anything we wanted to.  We could not have been more wrong.

 

I'm sorry that this a very long post, but this story is too deep to tell the short version of.  I hope you pass it on to the next younger generation of hunters and firearms enthusiasts. 

[PeacemakerJack 10,669]

Wow Carl—what a story!  Thank you for sharing the long version because I have taken a lot away from it.  As a youth pastor at our local church, I’m going to share your story with our teens this upcoming wednesday night.

 

 First, because we have several 17 year olds represented and young people have what I call “a super man complex”.  It is that feeling that they are invincible and that causes a unique (narrow) outlook on life.  I had it when I was young too.  I don’t look down upon them but look for opportunities to share with them a bigger picture.  

 

Next, I feel that it is beneficial to realize that life is a gift and it can be over in a second.  It is important to be prepared for what is next.  Also, we need to keep short accounts with those family and friends around us—we never know when it will be the last time that we will see them.  It is never to early to tell those close to us that we love them and better yet show them through our actions.

 

In addition, I see that life goals and aspirations can change in a moment.  You had a direction and a plan for what you wanted to do and in a moment people were trying desperately to keep you alive.  Your whole life changed and yet it wasn’t over.  Sometimes when individuals go through a dark, life changing event, they can’t recover to the point of living with a “new normal”.  

 

I also find it awesome that your that your life was spared because God wasn’t finished with you on this earth.  We never know when our time is up and so it is important to live every day to its fullest potential.

 

Finally, it should go without saying that firearms safety is absolutely important. There is no fooling around with them.  I never place the fault on the gun for an accident but when that trigger is pulled, you can’t undo it and bring that bullet back...

 

Yes sir, thank you for sharing this difficult story and being so transparent with us.  I’m sorry that you had to go through that difficult valley in your life but it appears that you are a stronger person because of it.

[19richie66 16,857]

Well said Josh. Nothing else I could add other than glad you are still here Carl. There was a wheel horse out there that needed you. 👍

[Red144runner 657]

Man that's a story all right. Yelled at my wife twice for interrupting me. Glad you made it. Terrible accident 

[Crazy_Carl 254]

12 hours ago, Red144runner said:

Man that's a story all right. Yelled at my wife twice for interrupting me. Glad you made it. Terrible accident 

 

 

That's kinda funny.  I'm glad you were into the story,

 

PeacemakerJack,

 

Those are really well thought out and kind words regarding my story.  It's definitely a good one to share with your youth group.

[Sarge 3,462]

A lot of us older folks look back at our teenage years (and beyond) with amazement that we survived. It's not a joke,  but most of us got away with a lot of dumb things just by sheer luck. I look back and say it's half and half,  I survived but certainly not unscathed. I came away with permanent damage to skull, spine and eyes - you're one seriously lucky guy. Glad things are getting better,  keep at it and you'll suffer a lot less later in life. Amazing how your outlook on life changes from one single event, but putting it to good use shows a lot of character,  kudos to you.

 

Might want to ask about stents therapy for the nerves, it can help.

 

Sarge

[JERSEYHAWG / Glenn 4,487]

Thank you for sharing, very interesting. 

Got me to thinking. 

 

Glenn