Seeing Hay Dudes thread thread on his F purchase spurred me to find this thread to make a couple of updates to the long winded F3990 review I wrote up earlier in this thread. This update is a bit long winded as well…
1) I had talked about the “free wheeling behavior” that I was having on steep slopes. I’m embarrassed to say that this is not the case at all. I was simply sliding backward downhill.
I think to most all of us using a regular front steering tractor, you know that if you start down a very steep slope you better have it in 4WD because your back tires may well break traction and you’ll find yourself in for an ugly ride sliding down the hill. It is pretty intuitive. Going up that same slope may not even require engaging 4WD because all the weight is shifted to the rear tires.
This is exactly what was happening to me, my front drive tires were breaking traction. (Backing these F’s down hill is no different than going down the same hill frontwards with a regular tractor. I don’t know why, for me at least, this was not intuitive at all.) Backing down, I returned the pedal to center and the wheels just started sliding on the grass and I thought it was free wheeling. Thank goodness for the auto-engage 4WD that saved me when I pushed the treadle forward. Driving a rear steer tractor takes some getting used to. I manually engage 4WD on steep slopes now, of course, which I should have been doing all along.
2) I have become another victim of the regen issues on these models. It seemed to me that over the summer last year the regens were starting to take longer. This year I was mowing one day and it started its regen and it seemed like it was taking forever. It never stopped. I finally parked it and did the parked regen procedure. It took forever, but finally finished.
The next time it went into regen, again it would not finish. I parked it and tried the parked regen procedure but it would not finish, just kept cycling over and over. I shut it down and went in and called the dealer for help. They were super responsive and had a truck out by early afternoon. The tech was not RickB
but seemed just as familiar with the issue. He hooked it up to his laptop for diagnosis, took the lid off some thing (some valve thing?), manually manipulated it, ran some line clearing procedure, ran the regen, and it finished. Subsequent mowings with regens weren’t a problem.
A week or two later when the parts came in, he called and came back with two sizable assembly items that he replaced, and I haven’t had another problem with it as of yet. Also, the regens finish much quicker now. He did not know if there were any engineering changes to the replacement assemblies that will permanently fix the issue. Mine is still in the normal warranty period, but he let me know that Kubota has
warrantied all of the three models with this regen issue for life, which is a relief.
Hopefully, there were changes made to the new parts and this won’t be a yearly issue. It’s sure an annoyance! It certainly lessens the pain in the butt greatly that they are very responsive, I was only out use of the mower for a couple hours on the two days he was here, and there is no expense to me.
I still am very happy with the mower other than that issue, and I don’t think I’ll ever be without an F mower again. However, when they come out with the new model that replaces the F3990, this one is likely going in on trade. I won’t feel too bad, since I know whomever the new owner becomes will have a lifetime warranty.
