I completely understand Eddy's situation, even at 400 hours, four times the time I have on mine it is still ridiculous. When you buy a diesel tractor one of the things that drives you to that purchase is the understanding that the core of the tractor, the diesel motor is going to last a long long time. So you would also think that the designer and manufacturer would build in other drive components that could also be expected to last a very long time. Obviously, Kubota mated a very poorly designed tranny to a robust diesel motor. Honestly that is just plain stupid! Then as Eddy and I have found, once a gear or bushing breaks apart, that metal can go anywhere because the fluid is feeding just about every other part of the drive and steering that is not the motor itself. So now you might be facing repairs upwards of $3,000. That suggests using overarching design principles that are almost laughably bad. Kubota mated a tranny that would have been inherently inferior (bushings instead of bearings) to what we would have all expected to be an inherently robust core, the diesel motor itself. The consumer would not have expected components to be so poorly mated to each other in that tractor. Further, since the design forces that fluid to coarse through every major component in the tractor except the motor itself, the inferior tranny exposes all those other expensive parts to potential damage. The mere fact that the new tranny is of a completely different configuration, bearings instead of bushings tells you how poorly mated the original tranny was to that motor and eventually the entire tractor itself.
Update on mine. As of my last post, it does look like Kubota and the dealer are going to pitch in to help me some on this tractor. I am still going to get hit and probably hit hard in the repair but it is way better than Kubota doing nothing at all. The fluid is not pouring out of the thing. The leak is a very slow leak indeed. Such a slow leak combined with the fact that the other tractor components that might be effected all function properly possibly suggest that the damage is contained within the tranny itself although when this happens, they have to pull just about everything but the motor apart to see how much may have been damaged by those floating metal particles. In fact, the damaged seal which causes the leak has likely been torn by some part of the shattered bushing or gear. As Eddy explained in his post, the tranny upgrade, which is the repair that must be done if the original tranny goes, is upwards of $1,100 and more likely something like $1,300 if you do nothing else. Then if other components like the much ballyhooed Glide have been damaged now you are headed for that $3,000 + number.
This begs another question though. Since the fluid is not pouring out of there in my case, when did that first gear or bushing come apart, at 50 hours, 60 hours, 70 hour?. These are all numbers that are just incomprehensible for a diesel tractor of this type.
While I brought it up earlier but especially since this is a diesel machine, since it does have an hours counter, it would make much more sense for Kubota to offer an hours of operation warranty for this tractor. I don't know if an hours warranty would extend all the way out to 400 hours and help Eddy out but you would have to think that it would cover my 90 hours of use. At any rate I am soon to find out much more about the actual condition of my GR. Have my fingers ad toes crossed.
