rScotty
Super Member
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2001
- Messages
- 9,532
- Location
- Rural mountains - Colorado
- Tractor
- Kubota M59, JD530, JD310SG. Restoring Yanmar YM165D
Funny you should mention this. I used my M62 a lot this weekend moving dirt from a new pond we had built and I did notice that the range shifter was not as friendly as I would like. I thought to myself 'finally!... I found something this machine is not good at!". I spent a lot of time in a range that was not ideal just because shifting felt a little harder than I'd like. You really have to push hard on the lever and I just don't like forcing things like that. I did get better at shifting by just bumping the shifter with the palm of my hand instead of trying to push/pull it. Pushing the lever almost always ended up with me massively overshooting the range I was aiming for. It might be one of those things that gets easier as it gets loosened up.. don't know.
Hmm....sounds like the range shifter hasn't changed a bit. I agree that I dont like to push hard on the lever.....not that it does much good to do so anyway. I agree that the trick is in the "bump and jerk" you describe.
To downshift the range I do the downshift variation of the "Range Shift Shrug"....I do it like this: lean to the left, slightly straighten my right arm, and rock my body while bumping the lever repeatedly with my palm until it moves....first into neutral and then only one or two more bumps puts it into the next lower range. The "Upshifting Jerk" is a similar musical move. The difference being that I have my fingers wrapped around the lever and am rocking my body and arm to provide a kind of rapid light jerking motion. Using the clutch or not doesn't matter for a normal range shift.
All of this is done with the tractor completely stopped of course. .
Very rarely a different thing will happen - usually it is when I am parked on a hill or stopped in some situation with some stress on the drivetrain. And this is not a Kubota thing, it is common to any any manual transmission and specifically with non-syncronized transmissions. This is when the lever feels more stuck, but it's really just a matter of those non-syncro range gears needing to be rotated just a bit. There's a procedure in the owner's manual for getting it shifted then; a descrition that made me nostalgic because it is the same thing my grandad taught me to do with the old farm truck and tractor 60 years ago. Basically it is stop the tractor, rock it with the treadle (or clutch back then) , and try the foot clutch while doing the above. Eventually the gears will rotate just enough to engage. You can feel it happen. That's real rare though, and like I said, usually on a hill.
My guess is Kubota put that description into the ops manual because they felt they needed to say something, and had no idea of what to say or do about the real problem with the lever.
The good news is that after 1000 hours nothing has broken, loosened up, or changed in any way with the range shifter.
So although it is a minor hassle, but it's also a very durable one.
Hmmm.....Maybe we can figure out how to fix it on TBN. Wouldn't that be a coup! That range shift lever is really is the only downside I've found with the M59 going on 10 years now. Even the tires are holding up well.