FEl Grease Zerks

[Turfman]

Lubing the FEL on my B2710 yesterday and I noted two things: 1) The zerks were loose in their threads, so loose that I could turn them with the grease gun. I tightened them.
2) One of the zerks had paint on the opening and wouldn't take any grease. The dealer had greased it, as evidenced by the grease on the fitting, but none had gotten into the bearing area. I cleaned the paint off and it took several pumps to get grease out the edges of the bearing.

Only had about 14 hours on her, hope I didn't damage it by running it without grease.

 

[Egon]

Do not fear. All will be ok. You may find that some of the zerks will wear or get plugged by dirt and have to be replaced on a regular basis. I have had to move some around when greasing and had no spares.

Egon

 

[ethiojazz]

I am fast approaching my 10 hour first grease and was worried about some of the zerks. Question is what kind of grease are you alll using ??? There was another thread where they adviced using any type, but this being my first front end loader I wanted to be careful.

Thanks.

 

[Turfman]

Just a good moly based grease.

 

[Pks]

I use a heavy Molybdenum, high temperature, high pressure grease.

If you do a lot of digging monitor the lower bucket joints. They tend to get full of dirt long before the other joints. I clean and grease them twice as often.

 

[weedsportpete]

Looks like the same as my loader - one of the grease fittings has paint on it; can't get grease in. This is a dumb question, but how do you get the paint off? Paint thinner? Its orange paint..


Do you always put enough grease in so that you can see the old grease coming out? Do all the fittings let you see the old grease coming out? I'm thinking that every five hours is too much, except that the rear wheel on the bush hog wouldn't swivel after four or five hours of work and I had to grease it to get it to swivel. On that fitting I can see the old grease coming out on the second squirt of the grease gun.

Pete

 

[Yukon]

To get the paint off mine, I took a small screwdriver and just lightly scraped it off. The paint wasn't really stuck to the metal so it came off in a small flake.

 

[Turfman]

<font color=blue>This is a dumb question, but how do you get the paint off? </font color=blue>

I just scraped it off with my Leatherman. Tapped it twice to crack the paint and scraped it off with the blade.

<font color=blue>Do you always put enough grease in so that you can see the old grease coming out?</font color=blue>

Yes, I just keep pumping until I get a LITTLE bit coming out the edge.

 

[dgood1]

My loader manual says to use a high quality grease designating "extreme pressure" and containing Molybdenum disulfide. The manual also said that the label might specify "Moly EP".

Seems to me that the price difference was about $1.00 more for the EP as opposed to the general purpose grease. At 2-3 greasings per cartridge that seems like real cheap insurance on keeping the wear down on the bearing surfaces.

Just my opinion though,

Don

 

[nnicklas]

I just bought a couple of tubes of Moly graphite--haven't used them yet. Anybody have any experience/opinion on this grease (It is marked as extreme pressure as well). I figured the graphite might coat the surface a little better./w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif