brain55
Veteran Member
I have a customer with a 259B compact track loader. He was complaining about lack of hydraulic lift power and the boom drifting down. I checked it out and determined that the LH boom cylinder was leaking fluid past the piston seal. Though the machine is under warranty he felt is was less hassle and more cost effective for me to put a new seal kit in it. So I pulled the cylinder off and disassembled it, sure enough the piston seal was shot. It looked to me like something else had come apart in the hydraulic system. There was a bunch of metal embedded in the seals, wear rings, and piston.
I called the closest Cat dealer and was told it had to go to the selling dealer and apparently for every machine sold a certain amount of money is put in a warranty account for that dealer. So my customer hauled the machine to the selling dealer 50 miles away. I may not work on a lot of Cat equipment but I'm sure I've repaired a couple hundred hydraulic cylinders in my 25+ years as an equipment mechanic so I'm pretty confident in my abilities to repair and diagnose them. The dealer is trying to tell him that the rod is bent and the metal was from the piston. I've seen plenty of bent rods and I have never seen one tear up a piston and cylinder like this, not to mention bent rods tend to show signs of wear in the gland and on the rod. I wish I had pictures. Anybody with any experience at all would come to the same conclusion I did. It sucks that Cat won't stand behind their equipment and wants to charge him $5000 for the repair.
I'm sure their lack of desire to make any warranty concessions is due to their warranty system. The more they keep in their warranty account the better off they are. When I was working as a Kubota dealer mechanic I wrote plenty of warranty claims I was good at it too. I don't get their policy. I'm going with my customer in the morning to have Cat show us where this rod is bent and explain how it is my customer's fault.
The reality is he won't buy another piece of Cat equipment.
I called the closest Cat dealer and was told it had to go to the selling dealer and apparently for every machine sold a certain amount of money is put in a warranty account for that dealer. So my customer hauled the machine to the selling dealer 50 miles away. I may not work on a lot of Cat equipment but I'm sure I've repaired a couple hundred hydraulic cylinders in my 25+ years as an equipment mechanic so I'm pretty confident in my abilities to repair and diagnose them. The dealer is trying to tell him that the rod is bent and the metal was from the piston. I've seen plenty of bent rods and I have never seen one tear up a piston and cylinder like this, not to mention bent rods tend to show signs of wear in the gland and on the rod. I wish I had pictures. Anybody with any experience at all would come to the same conclusion I did. It sucks that Cat won't stand behind their equipment and wants to charge him $5000 for the repair.
I'm sure their lack of desire to make any warranty concessions is due to their warranty system. The more they keep in their warranty account the better off they are. When I was working as a Kubota dealer mechanic I wrote plenty of warranty claims I was good at it too. I don't get their policy. I'm going with my customer in the morning to have Cat show us where this rod is bent and explain how it is my customer's fault.
The reality is he won't buy another piece of Cat equipment.
