HI folks. I may have posted this already, but what the hey.
I don't know how the innards of a hydaulic valve fit together, but I'll tell you my experience and what the dealer said. I had problems (at first) with the loader/blower not going into the float position. Later I noticed that the valve was freezing even more...woudn't move in certain directions. I asked the dealer ONLY about the float position problem (haven't talked to him about the problem since), and he told me about visiting the factory and watching them make these detents with too little grease. He also told me what they do at their shop: to drill a small hole in the bottom of the detent unit that controls the up-down motion...at the lowest point. It's a little tricky, because the lowest point on the detent is a sort of lip...not so easy to drill through, but it's not that hard.
Anyway, I drilled. I expected water to come trickling out, but it didn't. And at first, it didn't seem to do much. But we've had very cold weather lately, and it hasn't frozen up in the last two weeks, so I think it's fixed. So even though the fix involves the detent, and it was only the "float" problem that I was inquiring about, drilling this hole seems to have kept the boom-rotation hydraulic control from freezing (not just the float).
On the other hand, I did NOT drill out the other detent and when I put the FEL on recently, I found that the other directlion (bucket roll, side-to-side) DID freeze up. So I'm pretty sure it was the hole that fixed it.
Jim
