Really Cold Start

[uphere]

-30C to -40C wind chills up here are normal ... keep my LS4140HC out of the wind, block heater plugged in for 3 hours min., run 5w40 synthetic oil and she goes fine - well after a little bit of a warm up. Have a couple feet of snow this year - man, that cab is handy!

 

[MHarryE]

Nephew’s loader tractor before the Kubota was an IH 766. He says it started okay at super cold temps but the hydraulics wouldn’t work so for winter he diluted the hydraulic/transmission fluid and somehow eliminated the filter. Once he reached 45 he got soft and bought a loader tractor with cab. Transmission has always taken warm up time but works.

 

[Slowpoke Slim]

Slowpoke, your profile says you have a Branson. I知 curious if that has one of the Cummins clones in it? Does it use a grid heater instead of glow plugs?
If the Branson dealer had been better, I probably would have bought one.

Cummins engines in Dodge pickups are known to start when cold better than the powerstrokes and duramaxes. I believe a lot of that is due to the higher compression ratio of the Cummins. Glow plug diesels seem to have a harder time when it痴 cold. My Cummins has started at -15F without plugging anything in. Lots of guys will remove the grid heater altogether and they will still start down to about 0*F.
In comparison, a friend has a 6.0 power stroke, and when the glow plug harness wasn稚 plugged back in after a repair, it would barely start at 25*F. It finally started after about 5 minutes of cranking and made a huge cloud of white smoke when it did fire off. Reseated the connector, and it fired right up when cold.

3L,

It is a Cummins. It also has glow plugs. I have no troubles starting mine in winter. The biggest improvement for me was adding the hydro sump heater. I did add an oil pan heater too, just for good measure, but the synthetic engine oil really takes care of that one. But the hydro sump heater means I can actually operate my hydraulics, and move my tractor (HST) pretty much right away. I do let the outdoor timer run the heaters for a couple hours before I try to start it. And once I do start it, I let it idle for a couple of minutes before I bump the hand throttle up to 1500-1600 rpms. I then leave it to "idle" at the faster rpms while I'm doing whatever needs done. If I just let it idle at normal idle speed, the engine will actually lose all it's heat while idling.

I'm very happy with my Branson so far. I did use it to push snow tonight when I got home from work. I had left it plugged in (bypassed the timer) all day today, but it fired right up tonight. It wasn't really very cold though, only -8 F when I started it.