MHarryE
Elite Member
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2009
- Messages
- 2,946
- Location
- Northeastern Minnesota
- Tractor
- Kubota M7-171, M5-111, SVL75-2, RTV900XT & GR2120; CaseIH 1680 combine
Visiting my wife's family in MO and the farm of which we are part owner, my brother-in-law, who manages the farm, said that the L3000 he uses mainly for light work around greenhouses because if its small size was making a random clunking sound, forward and reverse, any gear. The tractor has 1,500 hours. My brother-in-law's preventive maintenance is not the best. My other brother-in-law came over Wednesday and we tore it apart finding the problem was primarily a trashed coupler between the FWD drive shaft and front diff input shaft, but the more we inspected the more expensive we found the problem to be. Splines on one side of the coupling were completely stripped out. The clunking was caused by the shaft jumping teeth as the tractor goes back and forth. Splines on both the drive shaft and driven shaft. Since the driven shaft is also the differential input gear, the gear set needs to be replaced. We also found the front and rear trunions of the front axle are severely worn. I am surprised there is no lube fitting on these trunions. The pictures show how badly the trunions are worn, and the bushings are almost completely trashed. The front axle was actually kind of flopping around under load creating misalignment of the splined shafts and contributing to the spline failure (shaft was fine on the other end where it couples to the FWD drive gear out of the bottom of the transmission. I remember my old L3710 having grease zerks on the trunion caps. My L5710 has much beefier end caps with 50 hour lube intervals. I am really surprised the L3000 has no means to lubricate these joints. Has anyone else had a similar problem? We have not yet checked with the dealer for parts cost but I expect it is going to be pretty expensive as the worn trunions are part of the front axle casting so nearly the entire front end needs to be replaced. If the new trunion caps don't have grease zerks we will drill and tap similar to those on my L5740. So much for anticipating a boring Thanksgiving weekend.
