FEL Losing Power

[Rockin' G Ranch]

I lifted a large box today to maximum height with my FEL and had the bucket curled to have the box level. I left it there a few minutes and noticed the bucket curl was slowly falling ( like dumping the bucket). The box was staying at the same height but the FEL was slowly curling down. The engine was running at idle speed.
I tried curling the FEL back up but it would not respond. I raised the RPM to 2,000 with the same result. I could function the FEL up and down but not the curling feature. The 3 point functioned fine also.
I put the box on the ground and picked it back up and the curling function worked fine. I did not try holding it to see if it would start curling down again.

The tractor is a Kubota L4740 HST. Any ideas what might cause this? thanks.

 

[J_J]

If the curl continues to malfunction, it is probably the seals, and or warm fluid.

 

[jinman]

I would look closely at the routing of your lines going to the bucket circuit. With the loader arms raised, are the hoses crimped or tight. Is there a possibility that tension was put on the quick connects? I'd reseat your bucket quick connects and do the test again to see if it repeats while paying close attention to how tight the bucket circuit hoses get with the FEL at maximum height. My opinion is that you saw normal bleed-by on your bucket seals when the bucket started to go down toward dump position. Lots of tractors have slow bleed-by in the bucket seals, leading to bucket droop. I just believe that at the same time, you may have put tension on the quick connects causing them to unseat enough that the bucket circuit would not function. When you lowered the loader arms, the tension was relieved and everything worked as normal. That's the only thing that makes sense for the symptoms you described.

 

[J_J]

When you say the FEL is losing power, that means that the hyd are not doing what they are supposed to do. Something is worn, broken, missing, no fluid, bad filters, wrong fluid, water saturated, etc.

If you know how the hyd system is supposed to work, install a hyd gage and observe it and you can probably diagnose the problem fairly quickly.

There are ways to check pumps, cyl, valves, etc.

You might want to change out those QD's if installed. When they malfunction, they cause some weird problems.

 

[Rockin' G Ranch]

Thanks for the comments. Only the FEL curling function was not working. All other hydraulic functions worked. I will check the lines and QDs on the bucket curling hydraulics.