In the fall of 2018, my husband started working on a John Deere 340D Logging Skidder that had broke down and had been abandoned in a farmers field. At the request of the owner of the Skidder, he worked on this machine in the field over the next year, he had no power tools and no lift equipment so this work was preformed under extreme conditions. Over the time the Skidder was in the field the owner never gave him gas money and it was a 70 mile round trip from point a to point b. The crew that had abandoned the Skidder in the first place actually came and stole the two piece drive shaft along with other parts off the Skidder. We found that the fuel lines were now cut, the blade is twisted, and the rear end of the Skidder was in upside down. After all these set backs we finally moved the machine out of the field ( pulling it onto a flatbed truck isn’t an option when the rear end is in wrong) in the fall off 2019. While driving it home, we found that all off the brake fluid was drained out of the sealed brake drum so the brakes seized up. We got it into a flat bed and towed it home. My husband is still working on this machine and him and the owner had a oral agreement that if he fixed it that he could buy it for scrap price ($12,000). Since this has all started the owner has brought someone over to look at it to buy it, told my husband that the bank is going to repo it, and now is telling other people that he is going to repossess the Skidder because my husband isn’t making any payments or working on it. My husband is a logger and in fact is running the owners other Skidder and if he doesn’t get some kind of a check every 4-5 days he starts harassing me! I get text and phone calls and if I ignore him it gets worse. I have calculated the hours worked to date x average hourly wage for a heavy equipment mechanic, mileage @ 58 cents per mile (which actually pays for the machine alone), not included were the parts that he used that he had on hand here since he assumed it would be his Skidder. How do we go about filing a mechanic’s lien and do you think we have a case?