Holeycow :-
Now sitting down to breakfast after being out & about putting the DK1002 through hard paces earlier this morning for c.7hrs, some heavy ripping, slashing (i.e Bush Hogging), a little FEL work & dug a few post holes with a PTO PHD + a Hyd PHD on the FEL, so now 381hrs:-
- the standard lights are woefull, so we'll be fitting LED bars & maybe some HID worklights (as is usual on most of our tractors)
- the standard tyres leave a lot to be desired lacking grip on really soft ground, there seems to be greater "flex" in the side walls than ideal (it could be our standard tyre spec's, pressures or it may be a ballasting issue with water in the tyres).
- slight (likely insigificant) whine in the transmission when crawling, gearbox has "freed" up as it was "notchy" when we first got it
- after an hour developed a slight RPM fluctuation/hunting at low idle, maybe a little sensitive to "dud" fuel we often have on this farm & we'll be fitting supplementary fuel filters/water agglomerator to the Kioti
- the factory FEL & 4/1 is ok with no surprises, a typical "farm biased" lighter unit & we'll be adding an industrial wear lip/teeth to the bucket, lifts a full bucket easily with reasonable speed though the static breakout force seems a little low.
- excessive harmonic vibration causing the cab door glass to annoyingly vibrate/reflect in darkness when operating under lights (looks to be just a door adjustment due to operator abuse rather than a concern with the Cab mounts), there's quite a few reflections in the Cab glass during night operations but most tractors in this size have this "quirk" until you have the lights adjusted right
- the Cab fan is noisier than most, I think there's some crud been dragged in past the Cab filters again(we'll be ditching the factory filters & going aftermarket as we don't believe they're up to our fine "dust"), the tractors has done c.50hrs in constant heavy dusty slashing recently (the Cab stayed quite clean)
- ran an 8ft extremely HD 150hp gearbox slasher fine in 2ft tall very thick grass & taller scrub, no bogging down or temp fluctations (ambient only 60F)
- good control over the PTO when bringing the PTO PHD up to speed & also runs the hyd unit fine
- the hyd's were smoother than I expected/remembered
- apart from one of our operators who detests anything that's not JD green ( & for that matter would rather be in a header year round) the general comment (from a pretty tough bunch to please ) was it's better than what we expected to be......
- we dropped the oil & hyd fluid last week & sent samples for testing, all fine/nothing evident in the filters either
- checked the air filter, seems to be keeping reasonably clean given the conditions
- no coolant usuage to date
Hope this helps in your decision.
PS - Yes guardian dogs are they way to go if practical, we use Maremma sheepdogs for stud sheep & it's worked really well. Unfortunately it doesn't quite work out for our larger sheep mobs as the sheep get then get confused with our working dogs (& scatter looking for the locked away Maremma's for protection/guidance)...but at least we don't have bears, coyotes...etc
to contend with - just feral wild dogs.