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Good Hydraulic Fluids

jeffb

Member
Joined
Dec 11, 2013
Messages
9
Location
Wyoming
What took out the hydraulic pumps- the zinc itself attacking the parts in the pumps or sludge from water contamination in the zinc loaded oils?
 

entasis

Member
Joined
Feb 8, 2013
Messages
24
Location
nh
hey (as in greetings) NIGE - my local deere dealer sold me a drum of hitachi 46hn cheap as it seems most guys prefer pallets of 5 gal buckets (scratch head, balls) for my ex220-3 - after reading your caution on zinc in filters (who knew), would it be reasonable to assume hitachi branded filters are zinc free? - gets comp-ler-kated fer the uninitiated - I do a lot of business in san juan, love it hot and sticky, and with zeroish fahrenheit predicted here tonite, I'd prefer to be where you are you lucky so and so - ****..........it might actually be merengue night at the blue marlin
 

neilhans

New Member
Joined
Dec 23, 2013
Messages
3
Location
India
Petro Canada 46 fluid is good but you can look for other options also. I aslo tried many times this one but other options may be good to try.
 

jeffb

Member
Joined
Dec 11, 2013
Messages
9
Location
Wyoming
Wanted to update you on our "wonderful" Hitachi EX1200. In the 2 years of running this machine we have failed 4 main hydraulic pumps. Not fun at $50k each. Numerous reasons for this, mostly terrible machine hydraulics design. Hitachi thought it was smart to tie all the case drain lines together in a daisy chain so when one pump fails, it fills the next with metal on down the line. We replumbed and made separate lines and are putting case drain filters on them with plugging indicators. We also added a supplemental kidney loop system to the hydraulic system fan circuit.

Also, we are getting rid of the zinc free oil. We changed about 6 months ago, and finally have started getting decent oil samples off the hydraulic system. We converted to a Philips 66 Powerflow AW32 across the board to help with cold weather pumpability on all our equipment, seems to be helping. It does have some zinc in it, at this point it was worth the risk.
 

aighead

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 25, 2019
Messages
2,541
Location
Dayton, OH
Digging this thread up from the past... I don't remember, at this point, where I've posted or asked about what, so I'll do it here.

Last time I attempted to do a hydraulic flush I used Sinopac L-HM46, I went shopping for some more but now I'm seeing "Ashless" in the description? I don't know if I need to worry about that? I'd like a good oil but my budget is not infinite and there seems to be a billion decent oils out there.

Also, anyone have any good tips on manually moving a 55 gallon drum of oil? I don't have a drum dolly or anything like that at home and my backhoe is down now, so it won't help much either. It looks like I could save around a hundred bucks if I could accommodate a drum, but I'm not positive I can. I have a small boom lift for the tractor that maybe I could rig something up for?

Well, crud, I didn't look hard enough, I can find the exact same that I have in there currently, 60 bucks for 5 gallons. Uhg!
 
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