Yes, what's pictured below is just a mechanical sand rake, so you may be wondering how this could possibly be considered exciting. Well, the Club owns two of these machines, and knowing they were aging, a new machine was ordered in September, however it has yet to arrive.
Not that surprising you may be thinking. True, delivery in one month might be asking a lot, however the new sand rake was ordered in September, 2022, and it's ETA is still TBD. Whether we see it prior to 2024, or not, is a coin flip at this point.
When both of our older mechanical sand rakes had breakdowns last month, we attempted to order the parts needed to repair them. Unfortunately, for one of the machines the parts have been discontinued. For the second machine, some of the parts were in stock, but others were backordered--having nine out of ten required parts is as good as having zero out of ten.
So for the past three weeks we have been forced to rake all of the bunkers by hand. Fortunately, our Equipment Technician, Don Robel, managed to find the missing parts through an aftermarket supplier, and he was able to at least get one machine up and running.
Clearly the bar is not set too high for us, when we are excited (perhaps elated) to be able to have a single trap rake functioning. For us, that was exciting!
It seems obvious that some of the turf industry has yet to catch up to supply issues, and this makes equipment purchasing that much more challenging. In the past, you could place an order for a piece of equipment in the fall, and request delivery in the spring, knowing you'd be good to go when the turf woke up. Today, you need a really good crystal ball to project what equipment may need to be replaced two plus years out...
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