I had a problem with my pt 425, when I backed it out of my garage everything went ok but when I pushed the tram lever to go forward something felt different. When I pushed down on the tram pedal it felt a little stiff and then it like popped into forward tram and hung there. I let off of the tram pedal and sure enough the spool had stuck in at about 3/4 pedal. I pushed down on the reverse side and saw that I had enough reverse power to over ride the forward tram, so I let it go and drove around in the yard hoping that it would pop back out but it didn't. I drove it back to the garage and pulled in and held it back and stopped it with the reverse tram and shut it off.
I then took the covers off and could tell for sure that it was the valve stuck in and not anything wrong with the tram pedal linkage itself. I called Terry and he said to send it to them and they would repair it instead of buying a new one. I had to go to Bluefeild the next day so I just took it in myself.
It only cost me $30 to get it repaired and it was ready to be put back in when I got home. For me that was a cheaper repair and a lot quicker than going out looking for parts.
One thing that Terry warned me about was to make sure that I marked where each hose went, which I already knew to do. A lot of times when you put masking tape around a hose or make up a tag to label the hoses and when oil gets on your tag it will make it to you can't read it. To mark my hoses what I did I drew the shape of the valve on a sheet of paper and drew the locations of the hoses, I then labeled each hose location on the drawing with a color and then I got smoking pipe cleaners with the corresponding color to match the drawing and wrapped the pipe cleaners around the hoses as I took them off. I also put corresponding color pipe cleaners in plastic sandwich bags and taped them to the matching hoses. That method of marking the hoses worked just fine with the pipe cleaners wrapped around the hoses and the ones in the sandwich bags was just added insurance against getting them mixed up.
There are better ways of doing the marking but that was just what I had handy at the time. I thought I would write about labeling the hoses in case it might help someone in the future when they are confronted with this. Trust me a little bit of oil and dirt will make the writing on a piece of masking tape disappear and then you will have to trace each of the hoses out and as been mentioned before we don't have those schematics to do it with.
I then took the covers off and could tell for sure that it was the valve stuck in and not anything wrong with the tram pedal linkage itself. I called Terry and he said to send it to them and they would repair it instead of buying a new one. I had to go to Bluefeild the next day so I just took it in myself.
It only cost me $30 to get it repaired and it was ready to be put back in when I got home. For me that was a cheaper repair and a lot quicker than going out looking for parts.
One thing that Terry warned me about was to make sure that I marked where each hose went, which I already knew to do. A lot of times when you put masking tape around a hose or make up a tag to label the hoses and when oil gets on your tag it will make it to you can't read it. To mark my hoses what I did I drew the shape of the valve on a sheet of paper and drew the locations of the hoses, I then labeled each hose location on the drawing with a color and then I got smoking pipe cleaners with the corresponding color to match the drawing and wrapped the pipe cleaners around the hoses as I took them off. I also put corresponding color pipe cleaners in plastic sandwich bags and taped them to the matching hoses. That method of marking the hoses worked just fine with the pipe cleaners wrapped around the hoses and the ones in the sandwich bags was just added insurance against getting them mixed up.
There are better ways of doing the marking but that was just what I had handy at the time. I thought I would write about labeling the hoses in case it might help someone in the future when they are confronted with this. Trust me a little bit of oil and dirt will make the writing on a piece of masking tape disappear and then you will have to trace each of the hoses out and as been mentioned before we don't have those schematics to do it with.
