I'm missing something: Front-end 4-wd

[gstrom99]

We use the diff lock regularly on our hillside farm. Might stop, might not. Takes rotation to engage after you press the pedal. Certain routine places Mowing, grading driveway, moving tree debris up steep incline. Can engage while moving before a trouble spot and disengage after the area. HST control makes this a seamless transition. Biggest beef is with the Kubota pedal design. My footwear traction is often compromised.

Same here. My 855 needs SOME tractor movement or it won't engage. If one wheel is spinning, and the tractor is not moving (who would just sit there like that anyway), you'd be stupid to try and just slam on the pedal and expect it to pull/push you out and get going. Some common sense is presumed/needed...

I have no trouble finding the JD lever with my foot.

 

[Raul-02]

WOW good thing there is a no weapons policy on this forum.

 

[jonsstihl]

like stated above, I find some movement neccessary to engage the diff lock there is a difference in one wheel spinning every so slowly to align the pin holes and a wheel that is spinning at 15 mph with the tractor at a standstill. a light pressure is necessary on the pedal until it drops down into the hole then you apply torque.

for those of you that stop all movement and depress the pedal, good luck aligning the hole with the pin. Atleast on the tractors I've used I would suspect it would take somewhere between 10 and 50 tries to get the pin to align with the hole

 

[Raul-02]

like stated above, I find some movement neccessary to engage the diff lock there is a difference in one wheel spinning every so slowly to align the pin holes and a wheel that is spinning at 15 mph with the tractor at a standstill. a light pressure is necessary on the pedal until it drops down into the hole then you apply torque.

for those of you that stop all movement and depress the pedal, good luck aligning the hole with the pin. Atleast on the tractors I've used I would suspect it would take somewhere between 10 and 50 tries to get the pin to align with the hole

That's pretty much my experience and it jibes with the advice from the Kiotoi engineers

 

[ovrszd]

I think the obvious got morphed into splitting hairs. That was magnified by the varying degrees of tractor operator experience in the discussion.

 

[Raul-02]

I think the obvious got morphed into splitting hairs. That was magnified by the varying degrees of tractor operator experience in the discussion.

Yah well put a bunch of fiercely independent guys together with none of 'em too keen on following anyone, and sooner or later that's gotta happen.

 

[Vigo327]

To the best of my recall, I have never successfully engaged the Diff Lock while standing still. I always have to move the tractor.
I do find it odd that such a simple one-line explanation was not in the manual.
It seems to me it's like shifting gears on a manual transmission without a clutch. I drove a VW Bug that way for some several months. The clutch was shot so, I just didn't use it. After a while, I got rather good at never grinding the gears.

The diff lock pedals on my tractors aren't a direct linkage, they're basically a pedal pulling on a spring pulling on a linkage, so you can push the pedal, but the linkage won't actually engage the locker until the elements line up.

I agree this got into splitting hairs. Sure it won't work if you're sitting still 90% of the time unless you just go lucky and everything lined up like winning a slot machine, but the main point is stuff should not be moving fast, with a lot of momentum, or with a lot of power behind it when the mechanism engages.

Also, most manual transmission gears are synchronized, and most people who think they can 'float' gears well don't realize the extent to which their synchronizers are silently converting to powder to cover for them.

On a related note, most manual transmissions have un-synchronized reverse gears. Like a tractor, quite often the teeth of the gears do not line up to engage properly when everything is stopped. If we take things in this thread purely literally, it would seem a lot of people's solution to that would be 'just keep pulling on the shifter and let out the clutch, it'll pop in!' and we can all imagine how great that would work. But the reality is that a nuanced version of that which is just a lot longer to type out, is in fact what everyone does, and is in fact fine to do. Apply a reasonable amount of torque, at a reasonable rate, allowing the pieces to align and engage under low-load conditions, and then resume normal operations.. yep, we're all pretty much doing that.

 

[Raul-02]

Apply a reasonable amount of torque, at a reasonable rate, allowing the pieces to align and engage under low-load conditions, and then resume normal operations.

OH ow that's a whole 'nother can O' worms

"Reasonable"
"Normal"
OMG
At least it shouldn't (in this forum anyway) lead to cries of Racism.

 

[tradosaurus]

Yah well put a bunch of fiercely independent guys together with none of 'em too keen on following anyone, and sooner or later that's gotta happen.

No, only 5030 being a drama queen as usual.

 

[jonsstihl]

I find when your are dealing with newbies, you have to be specific. we were all in their shoes at some point in our lives. some of us when we were 5 and others when we were 45.

the obvious is not quite obvious when you've never done it.

 

[ovrszd]

I find when your are dealing with newbies, you have to be specific. we were all in their shoes at some point in our lives. some of us when we were 5 and others when we were 45.

the obvious is not quite obvious when you've never done it.

Well stated.

 

[Vigo327]

The specific statements err on the side of caution (like 'stop the tractor') and then you get this thread about how technically that doesn't work all the time blah blah blah. Can't please everyone no matter what.

I very much agree with "the obvious is not quite obvious when you've never done it" but at the same time I've NEVER seen someone try to engage reverse in a manual trans by just pulling the lever towards reverse and letting the clutch out like the analogy i used, so we can assume there is SOME kind of baseline competency you can cater to with your instructions or anyone who ever couldn't get their shifter into reverse would just let the clutch out and see what happened. We can nitpick the wording of what we tell people to do about their diff lock but i seriously doubt anyone has ever worried that someone driving manual was not going to figure out that the above statement was a bad idea. Mechanically they're almost exactly the same thing! Why don't we try to find the perfect sentence to make sure noone ever does that in their car? Because they're not going to anyway! We're just sitting here giving tractor operators less benefit of the doubt than joe blow with a clutch pedal in their car. To me that's a little backwards.

I'm a teacher for a living. I teach automotive technology. Actually have a degree in occupational education, not that anyone cares (myself included). I still have to teach to a practical 'baseline competency' level, because if you don't have that baseline competency, you don't need automotive instruction, you need life skills coaching, or a psych eval or a time machine so you can go back and do everything over before you get to me or something but you don't need ME to teach to a lower level than i already do, because at some point it's not my problem and that's not my job. I teach to the level of people who are ready to be taught. If i gotta build up from 3rd grade to Master Tech i'm gonna need a pay raise and 10-15 more years to get it done. It's a 2 yr program. I can write you a manual but I'm not gonna write down all the things YOU need to know before you read MY manual. It's implied.