Cold Weather

Monday morning it was 21 degrees, Tuesday morning it was 16 degrees, Wednesday morning is was 16 degrees, Thursday morning it was 21 degrees, Today it was 24 degrees! A regular heat wave!!! Monday morning the pond did not have ice on it. Every other morning including this morning the pond has been covered in ice. Since we have had few days this week that the temperature got over 32 degrees the ground is frozen which probably is why the pond was frozen over at 24 degrees.
Last night I went and looked at a JD 3020 that a friend of mine is repairing. The owners son was pulling stumps with the chain hooked to the lift arms. He would back up to the stump, put it in a high gear and pop the clutch and let it run to the end of the chain. When it reached the end of the chain it would yank (and yank is the proper word) the front end of the tractor 6 to 7 feet off the ground. I think he is lucky to still be among the living. The lift stopped working somewhere in this assault. I looked at the control valve for the lift and pressure checked the lift piston and it worked. I pressure checked the control valve and could not get anything to work. It had a pressure valve that I could not open with 175 pounds of air pressure. It normally requires about 1700 pounds of pressure to open the valve for oil to go to the lift control valve. I then back pressured the valve and with the lift lever in the down position I could blow air through the return side of the hydraulic system all the way to the oil cooler in front of the radiator. I could hear it bubble in the cooler! I moved the lever to the up position which should have closed the down/return valve in the control valve. It didn't, I could still hear it bubble through the return side in the oil cooler. We pulled the control valve off and all the valve looked OK. We installed a used control valve I had on a tractor and everything went back to work. The only thing I could think that had happened is the wall between the high pressure incoming oil and the return oil had been cracked by the shock wave created when he hit the end of the chain. The repeated yanking on the lift had evidently beat a large passage out between the two oil passages.
The used control valve fixed the problem and made it an expensive stump pulling!!!

Eric Benton ,Southeast Tractor Parts, Used parts not availible at JD anymore!