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I agree with Bob – clutch safety switch is a known weak spot on these. My 304 uses tiny little wire to/from the safety switch, actually. I replaced it with heavier wire to make me feel better. (grin)
Chinese tractors have issues with marginal cooling systems. Just a bit of chaff or dirt will decrease cooling enough to make them overheat just enough to boil fluid out the overflow tube – pretty soon, very low coolant and big overheat. A 1-lliter pop bottle and some clamps will make a satisfactory recovery bottle. One of the harder bottles like bicyclists sometimes use would be even better.
These tractors also lose hydraulic fluid from the sump breather when they go up steep grades. Check for signs of oily tracks down the back of the lift box. You can add a piece of hose to re-route the breather up along one of the ROPS arms to stop the drooling issue.
I'd suggest draining a bit of the engine oil. If you're on level ground and very careful when you pull the sump drain plug, if there is water (coolant) in the sump it will come out first. I suggest draining out a gallon or so fluid into a clear plastic jug so you can see what you have. If you let it sit a day or two, oil/water will separate and sometimes, even engine oil and hydraulic fluid will tend to separate enough to see a difference. Might be informative. Oh – smell it, too. Diesel fuel has a distinctive smell, as does some hydraulic fluid.
As Tommy said, a blown seal on the hydraulic pump can let hydraulic fluid get into the engine sump.
Well, that depends on the meter used – some meters will show zero ohms when the connection is just really low resistance, others will show zero ohms when the circuit is open. Best to use a meter that is definitive enough to tell the difference between 0.1 ohms and 1 ohm or 100M ohms and infinite (open circuit).
Resistive heating elements such as glow plugs probably have a few ohms resistance when good and infinite resistance when burned out (open). A heap meter may not be sensitive enough to tell a low resistance. Pull one of them out of the head and hook it to a battery and see if it heats up. Hard to go wrong that way.
The 40 amp relay mod is easy. Get a single pole 12 volt relay at the auto parts store and wire it so that the actuator (coil) is hooked to the key switch glow plug wires in place of the glow plugs themselves. Run a #8 or #10 wire from the battery positive terminal on the starter to one of the relay's switch contacts and from the other switch contact to the glow plug buss. Now when you turn the key switch to the glow plug position it will activate the coil in the relay to close the heavy duty contacts that will supply power directly from the battery to the glow plugs through wire that is heavy enough to carry the current load without having excess voltage drop.
I use 15W-40 diesel-grade oil for the engine, 80W-90 gear oil for the transmission, rear and font drives, and AW 32 hydraulic fluid for the lift box. I never use all-purpose fluids if a specific fluid is available. The petroleum companies have spent millions of dollars on research – makes sense to take advantage of that.
Typically, coil spring steels are simple carbon steels of the 1050 to 1095 variety. If the steelis at the high end of that range, say above 60 or 65 points carbon, then the quenching medium should be oil heated to 140F. Quenching in water is too harsh and will crack them.
Likely, your fence wire is much lower carbon steel, (probably no more than 20 points of carbon), so it will harden in water just fine, but it won't have the durability or tensile strength of a higher carbon steel. If it were my machine, I'd get some spring wire, also called music wire, which is usually 1095 carbon steel, and make new ones hardening in the heated oil. Draw the temper to a blue or even straw and you should have a good, durable spring.
You say the engine revs well, but it won't go – do you mean it won't go forward when in gear? If so, then your clutch may need adjustment or replacement. How does the PTO perform? I think we need more specifics in order to diagnose this at a distance.
YOu should be okay, I think. I did mine at about 75hrs, as I recall. I pulled the valve train off and re-torqued each head bolt to the specs that Ronald at RanchHand Supply provided, then re-assembled the valve train and set the valve lash properly. Been fine since, too.
This is a good time to check every other nut and bolt on the tractor – I found loose wheel bolts, and other places that needed tightening or adjusting after everything had “shaken in” for the first 75 hours.
For tree stumps you need either a big shove like you get with ANFO, ors a high brissance snap like you get with PETN. So if you want the whole stump out, you mix up a batch of ANFO under and around the stump and wait several hours then light it off. Heaves stuff up and out just dandy, if the neighbors don't mind. If you just want to cleave the stump off at a given point, a wrap or two of det cord around it does the job okay. That one will be over with so quick the neighbors won't know what they heard. (grin)
