The rule is: "Don't ever run out of diesel."

I have paid and paid for breaking the rule. Its taken me 6 weeks to get my tractor restarted. I could have winched it into a trailer and taken it into town and got a mechanic to sort it out, but times are tight and I'm trying to reduce the amount of fill we keep throwing into this endless money pit.

The issue is that a dry tank means air in the fuel lines, and it requires a gradual bleeding through of fuel to push out the air. But I mimicked the how-to videos I watched on YouTube, and it just didn't work the same way for me.

I did get some peer support, and wasted the time of a couple of people. The good thing through that was that I did learn quite a bit talking it through with them and then watching them interact with the tractor.

In theory what I was doing was correct, but for some reason the fuel, although it reached the fuel injector unit, wasn't progressing.

You're probably not that interested in the detail, so the short version of the story is that in draining the tank, some muck at the bottom of the tank got sucked into the fuel line. No bleeding was going to happen until that was sorted out. Once the fuel line had been seriously flushed out it was a textbook recovery.

It did involve dismantling all the fuel lines and the fuel pump. It was depressing and stressful, but I do actually know a lot more about the tractor now….

I finished up with four litres of contaminated fuel. But that'll come in handy next summer as one of the tools for killing European wasp nests.