And that answer gentleman is a total POS non answer from Kioti Korporate with no supporting data and at least one seemingly ridiculous and unsubstantiated statement. If "very fine particles" "may or may not be captured by the filter" are an issue then why the heck don't they use a better filter? What damage is done by those hypothetical particles in the first fifty hours? As others have noted, crap in hydraulic fluid does damage real quickly and the appropriate way to deal with such a risk would be at the engineering and manufacturing stage, not at some vague 50 hour service point.
Kioti makes great tractors but the BS they distribute in poorly edited manuals and the fictions that their PR and customer service people like to throw out are evidence that they have just not yet reached the big leagues at least in the US operation.
The appropriate statement from Kioti on the 50 hour hydraulic oil change should reason something like this:
"Thank you for your inquiry regarding our confusing recommendation for a 50hr hydraulic oil change. We apologize as the confusion is clearly our fault. Frankly we don't know where that recommendation comes from as we have absolutely zero data on the matter. However, as some previous technical editor failed to bring these sorts of inconsistencies to our attention, and as my main job is to cover Kioti's *****, I will endorse the most rigid and uber conservative possible recommendation despite the utter lack of empiric evidence to back me up. Honestly though, we do not have any data to support our recommendation and the company does not feel it is worth assigning an engineer to look carefully into the matter or even to critically compare our own recommendation to that of major competitors. I would have called the engineer myself but I don't speak Korean so instead we looked at Kubota's website and see that they recommend changing the hydraulic oil at 50 hours. Since we respect Kubota's choice in paint color we decided to make a similar recommendation. We chose to completely ignore that John Deere does not even recommend an initial 50 hour service and doesn't recommend the first hydraulic filter and hydraulic oil change until 400 hours. Go figure! Not worth our time to understand what JD seems to know about tractor longevity and besides we don't trust their judgment on service matters due to their weird aesthetics on paint color. Besides, by recommending extra work we will make a bit more money for our dealers as many of you check writing slobs will be scared of touching hydraulic filters and that is the least we can do for the poor dealers who we force to jump through all sorts of equally stupid hoops.
Thank you for your inquiry to Kioti where the customer always comes first and we never bullsheet them.
Somewhat sincerely,
Your Kioti customer service rep "
The bottom line is that Kioti has drawn an arbitrary line in the sand and will now defend it with your your money and warranty rights. It is clear evidence that Kioti USA at the highest level is simply a marketing company with close to zero engineering capability. Presumably Daedong has good engineers as they produce a fine product but those engineers are somewhere in Korea and have not been tasked by management to address issues such as this. When Kioti finally matures to the point that good engineers write evidence based maintenance guidelines supported by data, Kioti will have reached top tier status along with Kubota and JD. Until then we will just need to follow the dictates of some technical editor who didn't bother to notice inconsistencies or lack of evidence for maintenance recommendations. If you don't like following the arbitrary Kioti recommendations then it would make most sense to see what JD and Kubota recommend on their similar machinery and follow those recommendations. Unfortunately in this instance that doesn't resolve the problem. It does point out however that Kioti basically just apes Kubota's service recommendations. I know this will be a shock to some folks who like to think of Kioti as an independent and leading tractor manufacturer. Apparently tractor paint color is more important than anything else in determining maintenance schedules.
