I broke It. Kubota SSV front glass replacement.

I broke the windshield on this skid loader. Did something stupid while I was out here demoing a new implement. Today we're going to talk about exactly what I did here, how it could have been prevented, and the steps that it's going to take to get this fixed.
A little bit of story here to share. Not everything that I do is a YouTube video. I had a lot of wood to split out here at my house. We had made a video and done some work with this splitter attachment. The cameras were gone and I'm out here working by myself going through and splitting these large wooden rounds. Now, it dawned on me while I was doing this that maybe I could split other things with this splitter. It did a great job of splitting these big pieces of firewood that I have. I've got a pile of stumps over here, a pile that I have never been able to get to burn properly that I intended to bury at some point. I was having a hard time finding a way to dispose off these things and clean them up.
It dawned on me that maybe I could take this log splitter and drive into these stumps and start to pop the things apart into smaller pieces. It's a hunk of wood, so why wouldn't it split? Sure enough, it did. I got probably about half a dozen times I was able to drive in and start to break these stumps up into smaller pieces. I was really excited about it. I started to work a little bit more quickly, not really thinking too much about what I was doing. It didn't take too long until my splitter got stuck in the stump, spun it, then the roots on the stump came around and whacked the window. I'll tell you, it happened in a split second. I did not have a moment to think.
First thing I thought is I'm sitting there, breaking this stump apart. The next thing the glass is shattered and basically on my lap inside of the skid steer. Unfortunately, accidents like this are not all that uncommon. When you walk up and down the aisles through the parts department in Messicks, you'll find we stock a lot of glass. Kubota even goes so far on these machines to make these front grab handles and stuff. They're removable. They're easy to replace if you bend them up while you're working.
A big flat piece of glass like this through the Kubota OEM part is $325. Not abusively priced. We keep them in stock because we sell so much of it. Not a big deal for me to go out to the parts department and drop a new piece of glass in here. The roll-up frame here on this machine is made to split in half. You don't have to replace the metal assemblies and everything here as well. It's just simply dropping a new piece of glass into the front of the skid steer.
As much of a mess here that I have made, this is an unfortunately common repair and one that's really not all that expensive in order to rectify. It is embarrassing to me every time I have to take a broken piece of equipment back to work. You'd think I know better. Unfortunately, there's probably some things here that many of you might be able to relate to. Some of those times that accidents happen, I was using a new implement that I was not familiar with. I was using it in a way that it was not really intended for. This is for splitting firewood, not stumps.
I was rushing because I was excited about what I was finding here. I thought I was going to be to get some challenging work done that I hadn't planned on. I was excited about what I was doing. Probably a lot of things there, red flags that should have gone off in my mind that should have said, "Hey, maybe slow down a little bit," which is not what I did. I charged ahead and unfortunately caused damage to this machine.
If you've done the same, if you need parts for a machine that you've got, that you busted up, need service help to come out and maybe help you put something back together again, or you're shopping for a new piece of equipment, we're here to help. We're available at 802-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.