That is actually helpful, and is starting to make sense. I did not realize that the cylinder would hold position after the handle sprung back to center.
Well, be careful now. You can basically set up a hydraulic system to do whatever you want, so don't assume there's a way that it's always going to be. For example: if your three-point hitch has position control, and most do (exception being the smaller Kubotas), there will be a lever, and that lever's position directly maps to the height of your three-point hitch. The lever stays where you put it. So you move the lever all the way up and your three-point comes all the way up and stays there. You move the lever all the way down and the three-point goes all the way down and stays there. And thus, for every position in between. This is desirable because you often want to be able to put three-point implements at a certain fixed height relative to the tractor. For example, if I am backing a hay spear into a bale, I want to put the spear at just the right height to hit the middle of the bale.
The three-point lever is NOT spring-loaded, which is why it does not return to center, and it DOES have position control, which means that the position of the lever directly maps to the position of the hydraulic cylinder that controls the three-point.
Okay... that all being said, the three-point is mostly the exception to the rule. Let's take your front-end-loader now. The FEL controls ARE spring-loaded. This means that they return to center when you release them. And they do NOT have position control. That means that the hydraulic cylinders stay wherever you left them when the lever returns to center. So you push the lever a little bit forward to lower the bucket, and a little bit backward to raise the bucket. You push the lever a lot forward to lower the bucket faster, and vice versa. The amount by which you move the lever controls the speed of the cylinders' movement, but it does not relate to the position of the cylinders.
Most levers with position control are NOT spring-loaded, and vice versa. In fact, I'm not sure there are any exceptions, but somewhere out there somebody has built a spring-loaded, position control setup that will prove me wrong.
What about detents? To understand detents, first realize that a hydraulic control lever is just opening and closing a valve to allow hydraulic fluid to flow. Just like turning on your garden hose. So what about an implement with a hydraulic motor in it like a backhoe or a wood splitter? That implement needs a continuous flow of hydraulic fluid, to run the motor, and then it has its own set of valves to which it feeds pressure as needed. So in that setup, one way to handle it is to install a Power Beyond port, which is just a hydraulic port that always has hydraulic pressure. It's not attached to any lever. Just like an electric plug in the wall without a switch, you plug into it when you need power. Another way to handle an implement that needs constant flow is to put a detent on one of your remotes. What this does is lock the handle in the "open" position so that fluid is constantly flowing.
What's the up-side of detents? The main up-side is that you don't have to use a bungee cord to hold the lever in the open position when you're running your backhoe or wood splitter. They do have a down-side, though. If you have a regular hydraulic cylinder hooked up to the remote, instead of a hydraulic motor, and you put the lever in the detent position, the hydraulic cylinder will extend, and then it will hit the limit of its motion and the pressure in the system will rise until it goes into relief. When the system is in relief, heat builds up in the hydraulic fluid, and eventually, you burn out your hydraulic pump. A little relief is okay and necessary. Running the system in constant relief is called "deadheading the pump" and will destroy it if allowed to happen too long. Deadheading can also occur if you have no implement at all hooked up to the remote and you put the lever in the detent position. For these reasons, some users prefer to order their remotes without any detents. They just grab a bungee cord when they need to run a splitter. This guarantees them that the pump will never be stuck feeding a dead-end circuit.
If you have a backhoe that is fed by one of your remotes, that's probably why the dealer ordered you one remote with detent. The backhoe will be run off the detent remote. The dealer doesn't want you having to carry around a bungee cord every time you want to use your backhoe. But it's uncommon to see more than one detent remote on a tractor, at least the CUTs with which I'm familiar, because it's seldom the case that you're running TWO wood splitters, or a backhoe AND a wood splitter at the same time--and even if you were, your little tractor probably doesn't have sufficient hydraulic flow to actually make them operate correctly.
Hope that all helped...
