[gowiththegreen]

just wondering what your worst breakdown ever was....mine was lastyear when a bearing went out on the front wheel on my sts causing the final drive to snap, which was followed by the wheel falling off. o yea......had a full tank of peas on too....66lbs/bu.....didnt get it up and running for about 4 days

 

[Don Boles]

Hopper extensions?

Don

 

[gowiththegreen]

yea.....around 300 bu on board

 

[Don Boles]

Thats not over what a 9750 to 9870 carries, are all STS final drives the same?
Other than the final drive did any thing else get damaged?
I gather repairs came out of your pocket?

Don

 

[gowiththegreen]

i dont know about the 70 series, but i think the 60 and 50 series final drives are the same. there was a few other things that got damaged.....the ladder got bent up a bit from hitting the ground, and the fiberglass door got cracked from the tire getting pinned under it......i think it was around $7000 to get her up and goin again

 

[ststech]

i wouldn't call it the worst ever, but it's up there

i was up fixing a few other minor problems. i just finished up as the sun was going down, then they told me to take a look at this machine and see what i thought




i said we had better find a truck to get it town

 

[combiness]

I'm not saying you're without your share of woes, Gowith, but at least your combine DID survive.
I can tell you of several with broken finals or wheel rims, etc...falling over on the tire, and being crushed to death [sprung, bent frame, caved-in sides, shafts, etc] under their own weight.

No, it's not a pretty sight.

 

[jd9600guru]

Fall 04' had a catastrophic injection pump failure which cost me 5 days, luckily the day after it rained so I didn't lose any cutting time. Same fall my 8820 tossed a chunk of fan blade into the radiator so that took a day also.

Working on my own and previously at JD, I have seen 3 primary countershaft failures on 20 series machines that put the combines down for 4 - 6 days.

 

[greentech]

One of my customers called me last fall and sheepishly explained that he had plugged his 9600 solid in canola and because he was almost done the field and the rain was coming he put 'er at full throttle and proceded to kill the engine more than a dozen times by flicking the little yellow switch. Now, his problem was that when he tried to start the engine, the separator wanted to turn. Needless to say, his separator clutch was now a one-piece molten ball of metal. When I got to the machine and dropped the oil on the engine gear case, I could swear I was draining 300 hour engine oil and not hydraulic oil, it was that black. Cost him $4g and he was down for 2 days.

Another customer called me and said he had a bad oil leak on his 9600. When I got there the back half of the machine was completely covered in hydraulic oil. The front case gasket on hydrostatic pump had blown out. One look in the hydraulic reservoir and I knew why- There was an inch of fine brass filings on bottom of the tank. The hydro pump had packed it in. Of course the oil is shared between hydrostat and hydraulic so the whole system had to be flushed- removed and cleaned tank, cooler, lines, valves, etc. I found a used pump and motor at the local wrecker. I did the whole repair in the middle of a soybean field. He was down for 28 hours and cost him $3800.

 

[ebertfarms]

on our old 7720 back in the day an oil line split, turbo started it on fire and it burnt to the ground in the back corner of a field.

 

[hopalong]

$20,000 +/- for parts, 6 months down waiting on parts (winter time did not rush), and 3 days labor for hydrostat on my Lexion.

 

[gleanerjunkie]

First day in to harvest last year a bearing in the hydro on our N7 went out. The outside race fused to the casing and seized up. The machine was down for the rest of harvest. The dealer couldnt get a rebuilt hydro for several weeks. $8000 hydro plus labor and a month or so later we finally brought it out of the back end of a field to the shed.

matt

 

[factoryfarmer]

Weld it back up there it will be fine

Ok I got a good one. Straw walker broke on the 8820 so we just replaced all of them, right in the middle of the season. Next day after a couple hours of running one of the new straw walkers breaks so we sent mom up north about 40 miles to get one and then she gets stop on the way home by a cop and gets several citations for not tieing the straw walker down right and we don't get anything down that day either.

That's why I like the sts's there's non of that crap to deal with

or this
But all we did here was bent the fender back and pushed the cab roof back up so we could open the door.

-Dave

 

[ebertfarms]

Walkers will keep up with STS in corn except with 12 row heads dave, just have to fine tune em a little more to run at higher speeds than an sts.

Shoulda ran duals on the 4430...unless the operator is completely ignorant im pretty sure it'd be impossible to flip a tractor with duals.

I was talkin to one of my buddies this afternoon about a kinda local farmer and he was sayin the frame on his 4430 snapped in half because he never bothered cleaning crap off it and it rusted out...expensive spraying day for him lol.

 

[grainboy]

My boss's N6 caught on fire and it was done for the rest of harvest. We finished with 2 G's borrowed from a relative.

 

[ststech]

Weld it back up there it will be fine

-Dave

thats what i ended up doing, i'm no welder, but it didn't look to bad, if i may say so.




and surprisingly enough, it didn't wreck the shaft

 

[jeremy]

Alright I have a list. When I was on harvest with S&L we were picking corn and one of our combines was turning on the end rows and snapped the drive and the same thing about the tire messing up the shield and bent ladder. I was working for another harvester in texas and we had a 9650 get struck by lightning and messed up every electronic piece on the machine. It was down for three days. When I worked for a farmer here at home we had some vandals get in our 6620 and run it into our 4960 tractor and left the header running all night into the front of the tractor. That one was bad. The last year I was with S&L I was running a new 9660 from the factory and at around 150 hours or so the engine fouled up and got oil in the radiator and water in the crankcase. Needless to say the engine blew up and a huge gray cloud of smoke went up. I was about 3/4's full of wheat in the middle of a section field. That one was down for about two days. There were more combines that year that had the same problem. The john deere guys said that there were about 150 combines around the country in the shop for the same problem. When I got mine back we had another one do the same thing.