Back in the day, every piece of heavy equipment and even most cars and trucks had zerks. A zerk is a fitting that lets you inject grease lubricant into critical moving parts like bearings, ball joints, hinges, and u-joints. Now a days they're not so common with sealed bearings, but the JD tractor and implements have quite a few. So it was surprising when I hooked up the rototiller and went to grease the drive shaft that I saw one of the zerks was missing. Now in all the years I've worked with equipment and had to grease them, I'd never lost a zerk. Since the rototiller was made in Germany, it'd have metric fittings, so had to go to the dealer. Of course they don't sell them anymore and didn't have anything that fit. So went to the local NAPA store and they had them in stock, almost inconceivable! But the best part of the story is the grease gun. I'd been using an old mechanical grease gun that I'd bought in the '70s and a few years ago decided to try a pneumatic gun. Well I never got it to work right until I recently was reading a blog that had a post about them. It said you needed to use the pressure relief valve to clear air from the gun after loading the grease. So that's what that button is for! Now the brand new zerks will be greased with the newly functional gun.
One of the shiny new zerks, freshly greased, in the u-joint of the rototiller.
The recalcitrant grease gun with the release valve in the center of the cylinder. I didn't get any instructions with it, so it took a serendipitous blog post to get it working right.
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