Hydraulic Flow Meter

638 · May 9, 2007

Mark,

Put a pressure guage on it first before you pull the valve. That may save you some unnecessary work.

ron

Mgray · May 24, 2007

Eureka!

I have narrowed down the source of the problem significantly.

I have my gauge, hose, and fittings now so I checked the pressure at the plug near the control valve. I got no response on the gauge. I started wondering if there was any flow at all or if I had a defective gauge. I removed the fill cap, removed the gauge from the hose, and put the hose down into the fill hole so that I could see for sure that at least there was some flow. As I pushed the position control lever, I noticed that there was some splashing that seemed to be unrelated to the flow from the hose. I removed the hose and put the plug back into the port. I pushed the position control lever again and there was that splashing again. What that means to me is that the fluid is bypassing the cylinder hence no pressure! I have already made adjustments to the relief valve so I think it might be something else.

The WSM has a trouble shooting section so I am just going to have to go through all of the items that relate to fluid bypassing the cylinder.

Getting closer
Mark

Mgray · Jun 5, 2008

Finally, It works!

For the most part, I have just been using the tractor to drag the mowing deck around the yard so it wasn't critical that the 3ph worked, but it was bugging me so I finally decided to pull the hydraulic block off the top of the tractor. Everything inside looked absolutely pristine. The only thing that I did was to replace the O-rings on every component inside. There were 7 O-rings in total including one for the master cylinder. The total expense for the O-rings was $5.19 from the place that quoted me $1100.00 to do the same job that I did. The O-rings I pulled out looked perfectly good. I put the calipers on one of the old O-rings and compared that to the new O-ring and the new one was about .004" (four thousandths of an inch) bigger than the old one. I didn't check the rest of them but apparently that did the job because when I put everything back together, the mower deck raised right off the ground when I pulled back on the lever.

I think I'll grade the driveway this weekend.