I believe everyone should do this to know how hot your hyd oil is.

[James23]

On my 1430 the hyd oil cooling fan comes on at 100 deg F. It is rare for the temp measured at the loader control valve to exceed 150 deg. I cut the job short if it gets to 160 deg. Depending on what job it is doing, I can tell that the wheel motor oil is very hot because it gets sluggish and needs a lot of treadle for the machine to climb over objects.
You may want to consider changing your hyd oil. Does it smell different? You have a great HD small machine, but have to work within its limitations or you will have a lot of problems.
To add an oil cooler, I put it in series with the return from the loader control valve. In theory it is very simple, you just take the line off that has the returning oil to the hyd tank and put a fan forced air cooler in-between. The only real difficult part is finding which line it is.

I read how you propped your pt-180 up in the air so you didn't have to drain the oil, I don't really have that option. Perhaps I will just drain my hydraulic oil out and convert to synthetic 0W-40 for the colder temps while I am at it. While it rarely snows when its super cold , -10 to -20 occurs every year or so. Might help with cold starting too. I can probably identify the loader control valve return (one of the ~4 smaller lines going into the tank on the exhaust side I think....right where I put all my electronics of course )

How many quarts of oil am I looking at swapping out?

Do you know the sizes / types of the connectors that the current lines have?

 

[MossRoad]

I read how you propped your pt-180 up in the air so you didn't have to drain the oil, I don't really have that option. Perhaps I will just drain my hydraulic oil out and convert to synthetic 0W-40 for the colder temps while I am at it. While it rarely snows when its super cold , -10 to -20 occurs every year or so. Might help with cold starting too. I can probably identify the loader control valve return (one of the ~4 smaller lines going into the tank on the exhaust side I think....right where I put all my electronics of course )

How many quarts of oil am I looking at swapping out?

Do you know the sizes / types of the connectors that the current lines have?

If yours is like the 425, you're lookin at 41 quarts of oil..... 10 gallons, + 1 quart for the filter change.

 

[m5040]

I would ask Terry at PT to approve the viscosity change. You can always use a magnetic heater to warm the oil for cold starts. But when the oil gets warm, you need the correct viscosity. The hose size is -4 or 1/4", the fittings are -4 SAE and you can use "push-on" type hose, it is cheap and you can cut to length and push the fittings in instead of hyd crimp. The return will have no real pressure. You will need a union to join two -4 SAE together (the fitting you take off the tank connects to the hose you add, then up to cooler and then out and back to tank where you need another -4 SAE to connect to original spot on tank).
One way to determine which hose it is will be to raise the loader up all the way, quickly drain the tank, take the -4 hoses off at tank (could guess at one, if not go to next or take all off).
Slightly lower the loader and when you do, the correct hose will spew oil that is draining the oil out of the loader cylinder. I say you need to do the drain quick because the load will creep down on its own then it will be a harder to tell which hose it is. Clear?

 

[m5040]

When you refill and everything is done, you may want to bleed the TRAM like you have to do when you change your filter. It is easy to do once you do it the first time. It is a precaution in case you got air into that circuit.

 

[ponytug]

Just FYI: The subject of oil viscosity has been covered in other threads, if you are interested.

I can say that for my 1445 there is no detectable difference in cold starting going from a 15W-XX oil to a 5W-XX synthetic oil, at least down to 32F. This is about what is to be expected from oil viscosity tables. For me, there wasn't any obvious improvement in high temperatures going from XXW-40 to XXW-50 either. You might want to consider that wide viscosity range oils (e.g. 5W-50, or 0W-40) breakdown faster than narrower range oils, such as 15W40, because more of the oil's properties are in the additives, rather than the base oil. The first number is the cold (Winter, W) viscosity, and the second number is the high temperature viscosity.

I have attached a plot of some oil viscosities below, so you can see how small the differences are at low temperature between 5W and 10W oils. Note that 0W and 5W oils have nearly the same viscosity.

Based on my experience, I think that oil heaters and oil coolers work better than trying to go for a different oil. The synthetic oil that I added seems to be aging as fast as the original oil that Power-Trac filled the tractor with. (Based on darkening of the oil)

YMMV of course.

All the best,

Peter

I read how you propped your pt-180 up in the air so you didn't have to drain the oil, I don't really have that option. Perhaps I will just drain my hydraulic oil out and convert to synthetic 0W-40 for the colder temps while I am at it. While it rarely snows when its super cold , -10 to -20 occurs every year or so. Might help with cold starting too. I can probably identify the loader control valve return (one of the ~4 smaller lines going into the tank on the exhaust side I think....right where I put all my electronics of course )

How many quarts of oil am I looking at swapping out?

Do you know the sizes / types of the connectors that the current lines have?

 

[woodlandfarms]

Unless money isn’t much of an issue going synthetic is a big cost. Worse is that when (not if) a hose ruptures and you machine bleeds out you will have to repeat those Costs.

 

[James23]

If yours is like the 425, you're lookin at 41 quarts of oil..... 10 gallons, + 1 quart for the filter change.

Yea, seems the consensus here is not worth it to swap to different type of oil, so I will skip that part. Your method to find the right hose makes sense, so thank you for that (and all the sizing info). So perhaps 1 final dumb question, is the original oil 10w-40 15w-40 or what? I see 2 different listings in the manual.

I was planning on adding the heater to warm the oil anyway, so I will just drain the tank and put it back.

Is the TRAM bleeder right in the back on the main pumps or is it somewhere else?

 

[ponytug]

To find out your oil type, I think that you would have to ask Terry for sure, but for mine it was 15w40.

FWIW: I have seen videos of people putting a shop vacuum on the fill port of a hydraulic tank, turning it on, and then unscrewing a fitting on the tank. It seems to keep most of the oil in.

Speaking from experience, draining all of the oil takes lots of clean containers...

All the best,

Peter

 

[BobRip]

I changed my PT422 from the original 5w30 to Mobil 1 15w50. The wheel motor torque is much higher when the oil is hot. I would never go back.

 

[joshlee]

Just curious, since some of you bought these temp gauges, what temperature is the hydraulic oil running at on your machines?