Greetings to all. It's been a good while since sharing any Hanna news, so here is an update.

Last posts concerned circle adjustment. It's been something of a saga. The 1 1/8" bolts that hold the guide shoes were beyond the capacity of my tools, providing an excuse to add a Milwaukee 1/2" 18v impact driver to my collection. It produces 1400 ft/lbs of torque for loosening. The impact driver, along with a good soaking of Deep Creep, got them loose without breaking a sweat. Same with lock nuts on the 8 circle adjustment screws.

But the real challenge turned out to be freeing the adjustment screws. They have 3/4" square heads that are on the inside of the guide shoes, with only the threaded end extending to the outside of the shoe (on which the lock nuts go). It literally took 5 of my Saturday grader days to free all eight, using a torch and various wrenches. In the process I broke one box wrench, a 15" adjustable wrench, and a 16" pipe wrench. To make things really challenging, one of the set screws broke. One entire Saturday was given to removing the stud. I initially drilled it and tried an easy out bolt extractor. It would not budge--with torch and 15" crescent wrench--the crescent wrench broke. In the end I drilled it out to 21/32" and got a 3/4" 10 coarse thread tapered tap to re-tap the hole. That worked (but required two trips to town for the bit and the tapered tap).

Today I was finally able to complete the adjustment process--and it seems to be working OK. Whew!

Final task before turning to actually using Hanna to tune up my driveway was replacing the two front tires which were in bad shape. When I bought Hanna, the previous owner sent two mounted tires that, while not great, are way better than what was on her. So with help from my daughter's partner (they are visiting from NC), we got the tires mounted. Pictures are attached. I needed to put the bucket on my old BobCat to move the tires from my barn to the grader.

Next week, fingers crossed, I'll try my hand at some grading on our 2kms of driveway.

Thanks to all who have offered wisdom and even some documentation for the circle adjusting. Much appreciated!

Very good, thanks for sharing.

One thing for future reference in case someone doesnt know, you have to be real careful with any kind of torch around the rim that has a tire mounted on it- if the rim gets a red hot spot on it that is exposed on the inside where the air pressure is it can cause the whole thing to explode due to the hydrocarbon fumes inside the tire that are given off as the tire ages.