John Deere 175 Hydro: power loss in reverse

[IDiggity]

Hey all,

I've finally gotten around to trying to diagnose the problem with the 1987 John Deere 175 Hydro that I picked up last year. Video of testing here.

I previously described the origin of the problem in this thread. Basically, the tractor doesn't go in reverse, and seems to gradually lose power in both directions after the first attempt at reversing.

Can anyone help? Anything is much appreciated.

 

[tws41]

I have the same problem with my Hydro 175. Reverse will work at first and then slowly dies, eventually forward will even go away. It also pukes oil out onto the deck, i am assumiing it is coming from the filler cap but very hard to tell.

I have the hydrostatic drive out and on the bench but was hoping to find out a general direction to go rather than just tearing it apart looking for a problem to jump out at me.

Have you solved this problem?

 

[IDiggity]

Have you solved this problem?

For the most part, yes. I ended up not even having to remove the hydro. Does your manual push lever not stop the tractor from rolling when the engine is off, as well? If so, you probably have air in the hydro like I did.

With the fender deck off and the gas tank moved aside, I could access the bleeder port of the hydro and performed the purge procedure to get all the trapped air out. You can find instructions by Googling, but what I did briefly:

Open the fill tube and make sure the rubber dip tube comes out after the cap. You should be able to see a screen at the bottom the the fill tube. Mine was bone dry.

Make sure you dont get even a speck of dust in your hydro when you do this, but unscrew the large hex cap of the bleeder port on top of the hydro. Even if it looks like the oil is totally full, there might still be air trapped in the hydro.

Add a small amount of oil to the fill tube. To purge the air and draw in the oil, push the manual push lever as necessary while rolling the tractor forward and backward. As the tranny turns over, the oil in the fill tube should fall into the tranny while the oil in the tranny rises toward the bleeder port.

Repeat this process with small amounts of oil until oil just begins to overflow from the port. Close it up, tighten the hex cap and then make sure there's oil in the fill tube just covering the screen by a little bit. Close up the fill tube and hopefully you're done!

 

[tws41]

Thanks, I will give that a try. What oil did you use, I have heard many different recomedations.

 

[IDiggity]

What oil did you use, I have heard many different recomedations.

I believe the tech manual specifies SAE 30 engine oil. I found something at Walmart that is supposedly "heavy duty:"

Walmart.com: SuperTech HD30 Motor Oil, 1 Quart: Automotive

Seems to be working fine for me.