HOT OIL MAKES A BIG MESS

BY AVALANCHE

PLOWING THE STORM’S LAST PILE OF SNOW OFF THE ROAD before heading down the hill for home, I felt –as much as heard – the “thwump” of a hydraulic line failure, and saw yellow-green oil running onto the freshly fallen snow. Hmmmm…. As the snowplow blade wouldn’t angle, but oil wasn’t gushing out at any pressure, I made for home quickly, before the skid steer wouldn’t make it.

Once at home, I got to further examine the hot, oil-dripping mess in the fading light. It seemed that whatever had popped was not on the outside of the machine or on the plow cylinders, where most failures occur, but rather somewhere within the body of the rig. Too late and too dark to figure out the problem for the evening, visions of an astronomical repair bill plagued my sleep that evening. Once daylight arrived, it didn’t take long to find that the problem was merely an O-ring which had blown out of a joint on the main hydraulic control valve.

Now it was just a matter of getting the correct O-ring from a dealer, the nearest of which is over 100 miles away. Opening up my factory service manual, I found a parts diagram of a control valve that looked decidedly different than the one in my machine. Not to worry, all answers exist on the internet – even if those answers are wrong. Going to the factory schematic for my machine’s serial number, I found yet another control valve that didn’t look exactly like mine. A call to large dealership with a sizable online presence connected me with a knowledgeable parts technician, who was a stumped as I was. We traded schematics and photos until we were pretty certain of the correct part. After all, the part was the only one listed by the factory, it had to be correct. He sent a half-dozen of them to me. In the meantime, I called a dealer closer to home, had the same conversation with that parts technician, and he sent me some O-rings, which arrived in the mail the next morning.

They didn’t fit. One thing I had learned over decades of working on machinery of various origins is that when the machine is made overseas, a lot can be lost in translation. The Japanese are known for precise engineering, meticulous quality control and a fanatical attention to detail. It wasn’t too many generations ago that a Samurai warrior would have to commit seppuku if he had dishonored himself with poor performance. That cultural ethic is reflected today in their manufacturing; but for whatever reason, service manuals from the Land of the Rising Sun seem to be exempt from that high quality.

Wrong photos, wrong descriptions, and incorrectly described service procedures are quite common in the service manuals from the Far East. In this particular instance, all of those things were present. With no one able to figure out what part was required to repair my machine, and the loader sitting in my driveway dripping $27-per-gallon hydraulic oil, I took the mangled O-ring down to the local auto parts store and talked with the helpful specialist there. We agreed that a metric-sized ring would be best, and within a couple minutes located an exact match. I grabbed a few extras, made my way home and got the generic $1.34 part installed, cleaned up all the pricey leakage and was back in service.

The episode brought back memories of when I did this kind of thing full-time – and why I got out of the business. The smallest and least expensive of parts can cause a total failure of a machine, at the most inconvenient time, usually in a snowstorm, in the dark, when you’re coming down with some kind of respiratory crud. With that said, this rig has been run hard for many hundreds of hours, with nary a hiccup. My visions of an expensive repair were thankfully false. And a $1.34 part is a pretty small price to pay to get going again, even if it took some in-the-field translation to decipher the problem.