Who makes your favorite skid steer?

nottaken,thats a shame. My oldest skidloader is 1984 that I keep around the house. Lets here about the ghel and good luck

Welcome back Yanmarman..........I like yanmar machines..... :usa

we'll just have to see on the gehl it's a good machine i'm sure but the operater is really slow on this joy-stick thing....that optr being me. i retired a few years ago and really could use some u$eful way to kill some time. once i learn a bit more about this machine i'll maybe get few gigs to get me through. i've gotta get a bit more proficient at the controls cause nobody i know is gonna want to watch me learn by the hour$$$$ i could make my little new holland dance and do things some people couldn't believe but this is like having to learn all over again.

I'm new to this forum. I need some help with a ASV MD70. How do I get to someone for some help. I can't start a new thread for some reason.
Cliff

what seems to be the prob? asv sposed to be a darned good machine.

LanceNE said:

KSSS - you are very incorrect.... contractors are better than everybody else.... grin! If this was a farm forum or hobby contractors weekly bulletin...but it is heavy equipment. I've spent many years in AG and how a skid steer is used in Ag is no way comparable to how a contractor would use it day to day. Unless, of course, that farmer is a contractor. There are plenty of pick ups that drive bankers to work.

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I encourage you to see if you can get a skid steer to last longer at a large dairy farm with migrant workers operating it on a daily basis, than on a contractors job. Skid steers go through hell and back again on dairy farms.

Im not saying contractors dont run them hard, but i think your a little in left field thinking people in ag dont use them hard. We have an LS170 that was on its way to 10,000 hours until it got retired at 9,400 to just gravy work. Those hours were accumulated in under 5 years.

dave esterns said:

you mean to tell me they are putting def on skid steers already?? ...yet another reason to get a jcb.

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Whats wrong with SCR? Some people prefer it others done, we prefer it and it works for us, other people it doesn't. If it doesn't have SCR it will be using advanced EGR, both have their ups and downs.

KSSS said:

The Fact that the noise level doesn't change from idle to full throttle is beyond weird. It defys logic but there must be some reason for it.

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Doesn't sound weird at all. A lot of these new engines are noisy at idle and actually quiet down throughout the powerband. Our new tractors our this way, as are the new diesel pickups and semis.

dave esterns said:

you see on the farm, as far as maintainence... first of all you got me trying to service over a hundred machines and do the farming as well, dont have time to grease up the skid steer every day, and it seems to do just fine without it. when there is field work to be done, and rain coming the cost of not getting the fieldwork done far outweighs any benefit from talking the time to work on the equipment.

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The cost of maintenance is cheap. You do it in the off times, before harvest, if a tractor is 50 hours away from a service and you know youll put 100 on it during harvest, do it before hand. If you dont have time, hire somebody, it will pay for it. Preventative maintenance is cheap in the long run.

That said, im not the person to advocate following the OEMs reccomendations to a Tee, they are usually underrated, but until i learn otherwise on what is safe to extend the intervals on, via oil analysis, industry professionals, and OEM reps, i follow their guide.

If we didnt grease our vertical manure pump as often as we do, the oil bath would loose the seal, loose the oil, and then we need $1,500 in parts. A tube of grease is $2.50.

dave esterns said:

never heard much bad of new holland skid steers.
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you must live in a hole in the ground, the newer L100 series have been a nightmare.

i will avoid scr or egr for as long as possible, hopefully ten years; or until they get something better. scr especially, i will run old school if i have to. just what i need, something else to deal with; and all the added cost.

if you follow your owners manual recommendations, maintenance is not cheap. you could replace an engine or tranny and be further ahead than following the recommendations in a 10,000 hour period. just changing the hydraulic fluid cost you over $1500. and who knows how much a valve adjustment, or an engine crankshaft damper would cost at the dealership... we run high hours with minimal maintenance and don't have any problems. i should prolly put together an itemized cost analysis of this...

i live in bobcat country, there are few new hollands around, or few of anything but bobcats for that matter.

dave esterns said:

i will avoid scr or egr for as long as possible, hopefully ten years; or until they get something better. scr especially, i will run old school if i have to. just what i need, something else to deal with; and all the added cost.

if you follow your owners manual recommendations, maintenance is not cheap. you could replace an engine or tranny and be further ahead than following the recommendations in a 10,000 hour period. just changing the hydraulic fluid cost you over $1500. and who knows how much a valve adjustment, or an engine crankshaft damper would cost at the dealership... we run high hours with minimal maintenance and don't have any problems. i should prolly put together an itemized cost analysis of this...

i live in bobcat country, there are few new hollands around, or few of anything but bobcats for that matter.

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You need to wake up and smell the roses.

Just to prove my point I ran the costs on servicing one of our older LS170s the way new holland says to. Grease every 50 hours, Oil every 100 hours, hydro and fuel filter every 500 hours, air filters every 1000 hours and coolant flush every 2000 hours. They also have many other adjustments in there that i did not include such as valve lash, but i do all of that here myself, its not hard to do.

You list the crankshaft dampner as an example. A dampner for an 8.3 cummins which is a very common engine used in your beloved JCB Fastrac, older magnum tractors, older New hollan tractors, older Agco tractors, and so on. Is $140 from the Case IH Dealer. You'd have way more than that stuck in engine repair if your dampner failed. Am I saying to replace it very often? No. Just showing you the numbers on it.

Back to the skid steer.

Grease at 50 hours, figuring on the skid steer taking a half a tube of grease, over 10,000 hours at $3 a tube (being generous here) you would spend $300 on grease. The Pins on that skid steer are between $30 and $100 each plus their respective hardware. Over 10,000 hours, with no grease youll be replacing a lot of them.

Onto the engine. Doing the oil, coolant, fuel and air all at the OEMs reccomendations comes out to $3,813 for my current costs to service that skid steers engine per the OEM reccomendations. Thats for all fluids and filters. Now I also figured out the labor on what it takes to get each service done. @$15 per hour for the guy doing the work, it would be around $600, but we all know that things dont always get done as quickly as they should and there is interruptions and such so id add a hundred or 200 to that number. So now were at $4,600 roughly for engine service for 10,000 hours, labor, fluids, filters. So how much is it going to cost us to replace that engine? Well right now the cost for a Reman long block is $6,300. Thats just for the long block, you still have all of your other miscellaneous gaskets and hardware etc. Plus the labor bill. I dont know the flat rate for engine replacement but either way, you can see that service is going to cost you less in the long run, that replacing the engine. Plus there is also the downtime factor of issues that could occur along the way. Regular maintenance happens when you fit it in throughout the week, breakdowns happen when you never want them too, so there is also the lost money from the breakdown.

Now are the OEMs intervals overkill? Some are some aren't. Use oil analysis and good judgement to determine the right interval.

But hey, there are many ways to skin a cat, some people prefer the no, or minimal service route and it works for them.

Cheers.

928G Boy said:

And no offense but your article shouldn't be called "contractors prefer _____ skid steers" it should be more like "random people on the internet prefer ____ skid steers" I don't remember any pre-qualification about being a contractor to vote in the poll

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None taken.

You are correct about this being an internet poll. But I do these polls weekly and, with the exception of the No. 2 result on this particular one, the numbers seem to line up pretty consistently with the way you'd expect from market share and other indicators in the construction industry.

I hope nobody thought I was trying to pass this off as statistically valid research. Just a conversation starter.

barklee said:

Where is Takeuchi on this list? People really like a JCB better? I can see Bobcat at number 1 but thats about it.....

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This poll was specifically about skid steer loaders. I'll start one about compact track loaders soon enough.

if you are going to have a problem, chances are it wont be related to your maintenance intervals. a lot of it is the luck of the draw. i have never heard of anyone's engine going because the oil was too old. you have trouble when you use the wrong oil, have no oil in the engine at all, plugged radiator, no coolant in the engine; oil pump or water pump failure, oil plug fall out, oil filter come off, forget to change water to antifreeze for the winter, etc...

same with trannys, its never an oil problem. its either an idiot driving, a linkage problem, o ring or some small failure that leads to a big failure.

we had 2 trannys go in 2 tractors and both of them were just out of warranty and only had about 1000 hours on them.

we had one engine go once because it had no oil in it, another engine problem because there was no coolant in it.

we got another tractor with 10,000 hours on it and literally have done almost no maintenance on it since it was new. change the engine oil every 500 hours or so, throw a new hydraulic filter on every few thousand hours, thats it. coolant and transmission and hydraulic fluid have never been changed. granted, we have to add some every so often...

seems to me no one really uses their equipment these days. im impressed with the mining industry. when your running your machine over 50,000 hours and a new one cost a few million dollars, and your running 24-7-365, and losing big $$ when its down, then i would be more concerned about maintenance.

i dont have time to figure the cost of maintenence on the big tractor, but i suspect over 10,000 hours you would be well over 20k if you followed the recommendations. you could fix an engine or tranny for a lot less, but chances are you might not have a problem anyway, the key would be to put her up for auction around 8000 hours. i have quite the strategy, i know, but it works out for me.

on our skid steer, most of the pins and bushings are original with 10k hours, they just get a little loose thats all. it works good for cleaning up the uneven concrete, cuz the bucket follows the uneven terrain. sounds like im 4k ahead of the game here, since we never had a problem with it.

however, on the manure spreader, i grease the auger bushings religiously (every 5 hours or less). because if i dont, i will be replacing them instantly. i never grease the rest of the spreader, but i make sure to get those 4 bushings.

You kind of contradict yourself at the end there, you said breakdowns are not related to maintenance but yet at the end you say they are?

If you dont think your loosing money as a farmer when your equipment is broken, your on crack or dont farm much. but with 100 machines, you must have a lot of land to farm, or a back up for every piece of equipment.

There are plenty of failures due to poor maintenance. Most of the Fendt transmissions that have failed are due to people not changing the filters. $20,000 repair bill.

And dont forget resale value, when I can hand somebody a maintenance schedule showing that it has been well or overly serviced, they are much more comfortable buying it and thus the machine is worth more.

Again to each their own.

it really all depends.

by the way, dont bother replacing the bushings in our skid steer, the wear goes way beyond the bushings.

for the record, i maintain stuff a lot more than any of the other local farmers. most farmers are just as awesome as me and dont even know it.

i also maintain the chopper, because it is a high maintenance item, and problematic when it breaks. if a tractor breaks its no big deal.

if i had a fendt, i would be sure to maintain that transmission. the engine i would not be concerned about.

i find farmers pay excessive amounts for equipment at auction regardless of condition for some reason.

take your pickup truck to your local dealer, try to trade it off, you wont get any more if you have service records or not. with pickup trucks, buy a diesel, run it into the ground till you have your first problem, and trade it. thats the best way i have found to do it.

dave esterns said:

it really all depends.

i also maintain the chopper, because it is a high maintenance item, and problematic when it breaks. if a tractor breaks its no big deal.

if i had a fendt, i would be sure to maintain that transmission. the engine i would not be concerned about.

take your pickup truck to your local dealer, try to trade it off, you wont get any more if you have service records or not. with pickup trucks, buy a diesel, run it into the ground till you have your first problem, and trade it. thats the best way i have found to do it.

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I wish we had the luxury of not worrying about breakdowns.

If you bought a new diesel pickup and traded it every time you had your first problem, you would be trading weekly. No amount of service can fix them, although the new new 2011s are getting a little better.

Trade in on a pickup, service records arent going to help, tractor or semi, they will help a little. Where they help most is private party.

well... i plan on keeping the 04 dodge 5.9 forever for obvious reason. if i was in a newer truck i would keep trading for obvious reason.

i have to say deere for sure and my fav modle is the d series i like the fly by wire

does anyone use eaton instead of rexroth?

My favorite has been bobcat 773 because of the controls, but now I have a gehl because it was cheaper. My Dad's got a JCB now since it is easier for an older person to get in and out of.

Hows the JCB doing?I;ve only seen a couple around here,and was wondering how they are?