More Orange for us...........

[CumminsLuke]

Well, we are dumping the very light and very tired John Deere 4600 with a whopping 1250 hours on the clock in favor of a brand new M6040 4x4, hyd shuttle, Rops. Should take delivery sometime next week. Only two non orange left in the fleet, but I think I'll hold on to them.

[Bob_Young]

"very tired" at 1250 hours? That's not the John Deere I knew.

You must work 'em hard, Luke. Congrats on the M6040. That model always seemed like the "winner" in the M40 series...not that there's anything wrong with the other two.

[The Gardener]

Just curious why you chose not to buy a second, duplicate M7040. Was the decision more involved beyond cost?

:The Gardener

[CumminsLuke]

Cost was part of the reasoning. The 7040 is a tractor I keep at home for use on my farm. The 6040 will be used at my business. I did not need two cab tractors, and the dealer did not have another 7040 without a cab, but he did have a 6040. My other problem was time, as I said the JD 4600 was laying down, had about three real serious problems that I did not want to put the money into it to fix.

[deereguy]

If I can ask..... what kind of troubles is the JD 4600 having at 1250 hours? I have a JD 4500 with 1K hours last week, what should I potentially look out for?

[CumminsLuke]

Well, the first thing I have with the 4600 is a starting problem. The starter will only grab about 1/2 the time. We thought we had a bad starter, put a new one on still only starts half the time. Dealer says ring gear has teeth broken off tractor needs to be split. Both of the joints on the inner part of the steering cylinder are about to fall out, and now we have real bad growl coming from the front end when in 4-wd. All of the loader mounting points are very loose and the whole loader flops if you grab a hold off it and give it a good shake. I have also had about five or six bad hydraulic leaks since it was new. Tractor has been serviced and all it has done is pull an 84" LandPride finish mower and a 72" JD rotary cutter. Once in a while I'll lift items up to about 1,000 lbs. with the loader and pallet forks on and off a truck.

[Taiser]

WOW!!! That's a whole lot of serious problems for 1000 hour tractor, especially a deere!!! Must have been a Monday morning or Friday afternoon built tractor!!!

[CumminsLuke]

I don't know, we bought it new, and it has been like this all along. We really do not use it that hard. Had a 5400 Deere before that and it was a lot tougher but I still had some cold starting problems with it. I have sure had good luck with my orange tractors though. My old Ford 1320 has been a good one also. It has got about 1500 hrs of mowing on it and it has been about 95% 16-18 year old boys running it and I have never done anything to it but service it.