My Blood Runs Anything but Green

Every time I think I’m done fixing my outdoor power tools, they pull me back in.

Now it’s my John Deere garden tractor, again.

When I bought this thing used, I read up on it, and I found that odd people who made landscaping a kind of sick hobby thought it was wonderful. They said this tractor was coveted and would last forever. I saw nasty old ones selling for over $3000.

Since then, the rear hydraulic cylinder has failed, a big spring on the belly mower has snapped, and the PTO clutch has refused to work. All this, under very light use. If this is what a great, dependable old mower is like, what are the bad ones like?

The cylinder is what turned me off John Deere forever. Even buying a John Deere hat would make me nervous.

The rear seal failed, and oil gushed out. This is the same oil that runs the transmission and steering.

A normal hydraulic cylinder has a removable cap on one or both ends. When your seals fail, you unscrew a cap, pull the rod out, pull the old seals off, put new ones on, seal everything up, and go back to work. Back when my cylinder’s seal failed, a similar cylinder from a different company might have cost $100. My cylinder was around $180, I believe, and now they are discontinued.

The John Deere cylinder was welded shut on both ends. Welded. Seals are expected to fail. It’s not a sign something is defective. A seal is like a spark plug or shock absorber. They have to be replaced every so often. And John Deere gave me two cylinders that were welded shut. This is like selling you a car with the lug nuts welded on.

I managed to install a new cylinder. I could have used the lathe to cut the old one open, and I could have done a lot of welding and threading to turn it into a new cylinder, but it was May, it was hot, and my yard was a mess.

Installing the new cylinder was a nightmare because John Deere made the tractor as hard as possible to work on.

When the next cylinder fails, I will have to find a way to rebuild an old one or replace it with something different. Even if the replacement is Chinese, it will be better than the original.

Right now, my fuel lines are leaking. If I had written this two days ago, I would be able to say my fuel LINE was leaking, but I screwed up another line when I tried to fix it.

The injector pump has three rigid plastic lines going into the top. They have 17 mm hex fittings, and the fittings are so close together, there is no kind of wrench that can be applied to the center fitting without removing one of the others. Guess which fitting was leaking?

When I turned the front fitting, instead of getting easier to turn, it got harder. I found out this was because the fitting and line were stuck together. The fitting should have turned around the line, but it twisted it instead.

After a lot of fruitless work, I started the tractor and limped it into the workshop so it would be sheltered while I looked for answers.

Finding answers was hard. I started yesterday, it’s about noon, and I finished about half an hour ago.

John Deere’s shop manual is useless. John Deere’s site is useless. The site showed me fuel lines, and I bought two, but it did not mention the crush washers and O-rings that also have to be replaced. I got that information elsewhere.

These parts are not shown on Deere’s online diagrams. I finally found a fuel injection manual published by Yanmar, the maker of the engine, and that gave me Yanmar part numbers. For parts legitimately worth about $10, I just spent about $50. That doesn’t include the lines. The local Deere dealer doesn’t stock any of these things, so I ordered everything online.

Someone else out there will have this problem and need help, so I will cut and paste some information including part numbers.

Fuel lines:
Front – AM100753, replaced by AM876210
Middle – AM100754, replaced by AM876211
Rear – AM100755, replaced by AM876212

O-ring (Yanmar): 124550-51370
Packing (Yanmar plunger barrel 28): 174307-52170
Packing (Yanmar delivery valve seat 19): 124550-51350

***CORRECTION: someone who asked me not to reveal the correct numbers for the Yanmar parts says my numbers are wrong. I already used these numbers to order, so I am going to order the other parts and see how they compare. I guess I’ll have to eat some shipping costs.***

The delivery valve seat packing goes under the O-ring and a couple of other things. The other one (plunger barrel) goes farther down. See Yanmar manual.

I may not have parts for a week, and my yard has been growing ever since the tree crew massacred a bunch of dangerous oaks. They wiped out a lot of the yard, and then we had very hot, dry weather, so I had to let the grass rest. Yesterday would have been a great time to start mowing again. Now I’ll have to deal with deep grass and seed heads.

Should I complain about the failure of these 34-year-old parts? No, but John Deere could make some effort to help people get new ones. The site doesn’t list them or provide diagrams, and when you use the tool that tells the site to list parts appropriate for your product, it won’t let you.

My plan for this tractor is to keep it going until it blows up or until I can no longer stand fixing it. Then I’m getting a gas zero-turn, or, if Jeff Bezos gets high on mushrooms and sends me a hundred million dollars, a diesel zero-turn, which would last longer and be less trouble.

My real tractor is also acting up.

Modern tractors have a bunch of irritating parts designed by lawyers, not engineers. They have all sorts of switches that turn them off when you really need them. For example, I had to bypass a switch on the John Deere that shut the engine down whenever I got off.

The other day, I got my newly-revived and modified Echo chainsaw out to cut a big oak that fell unexpectedly, and it would not run. For the 3000th time. I finally guessed it might be the fuel filter, but none of the new ones I had were the right size. I rinsed the old one with brake cleaner, and now the saw runs.

This took up a lot of my time. When it was over, I got back to work, and my Kubota tractor, which I needed to move wood, refused to start.

After a lot of who shot John, I realized it would start if I jiggled the forward/reverse pedal. I got some wood moved.

I went on the web asking people if they had any idea where the safety switch on the pedal was. I could not find it. They said there was no safety switch. That was last week. Finally, today, someone told me where it was and how to fix it.

The tractor works, but I have to fiddle with the pedal, so I am going to have to creep under it in the summer heat and handle the problem, which will turn out to be harder to fix than I now expect.

I don’t know what other obscure problems the John Deere will have in the future. Another failed hydraulic cylinder is a certainty. Maybe I should buy a used one now and modify it. I hope the next bad cylinder will be the one on the steering, because that one is easy to get to.

I understand when products have unavoidable problems due to their nature and the natures of their jobs. Stupidity is another thing. Deliberately sabotaging customers, which John Deere did, is yet another. They could have used the same kind of cylinder everyone else uses. They went out of their way to make things hard and expensive. Would I buy more John Deere products? No. The whole business makes me hope they go bankrupt. A John Deere bankruptcy would benefit the consumer by allowing better companies to fill the void, just as the huge defeats the Big Three experienced gave us access to Toyota and Honda.

It would help. Or would it? The other companies may be just as bad. I tend to doubt it, based on the scuttlebutt about John Deere’s attitude toward hosts. I mean customers.

You poison Kim Jong Un, his sister steps in, and she’s even worse. That’s how the world often works.

I spend a fair amount of time on tractor forums, and my understanding is this: all small tractors (below 100 horsepower) are equal in quality. Except Mahindras, which are worse. They’re all made overseas. They all last about the same number of hours. The key to a good tractor experience is picking a good dealer, not a good tractor. You need someone who will be helpful when you need repairs.

The local Kubota place is pretty good. I’m afraid to enter the Deere dealership.

Buying a John Deere will not guarantee you a superior tractor made by American hands. It will get you a foreign tractor just like every other company’s tractor, but the service and parts picture may be much, much worse.

If you absolutely have to have green, there is always Krylon.

Just for fun, I’ll price zero-turns.