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That's a two-part question. First answer is, no. Second answer is, Hell no! If I diversify any more I'll have to clone myself – again.
Moot point, David. Tommy has gotten me fixed up and I'll be replacing them with new OEM cylinders. The other issue is that there are no hydraulic shops in the Virgin Islands and it isn't cost effective to ship the damaged cylinders out to have them re-manufactured.
I'll be doing a bunch of mod work to the loader bucket mounts and cylinder mounts to correct a geometry issue that causes the cylinder rods to flex over the loader arms at full uncurl.
Ya see? It's posts like that that get you into the “elite” category.
Maybe for the over 550 crowd we could use the title “Garrulous” or “Fanatic” or “Dedicated”? Better leave it up to Hal – the ones I come up with are all silly!
If the QC is an OEM Chinese one, I would never bother trying to repair it – the blasted things have too high a failure rate as it is, and Chinese rubber is notoriously bad. Too many people have had the Chinese QC fittings on their loaders fail and deadhead the pump and blow it up.
Best to just replace the complete fitting with a good one from one of the quality brand name companies, I'd say.
What Tinbender says is, sadly, too true. The OEM Chinese control valve assembly on the ZL-30 loaders have no provision for power beyond or float or regenerative cycling, either. They are as basic as they can be, and pretty sloppily made at that. Mine drove me crazy with its slow movement, lack of finesse and inability to make “compound” moves. The only solution was to replace it.
I replaced mine with, as noted previously, an after-market valve assembly from RanchHand Supply. I'm sure Tommy at Affordable Tractor Sales also sells a similar (or identical) unit. As noted, at around $600 it was not cheap, bu tit made all the difference in the world to the way the loader operates. It was a snap to install and came with the necessary hoses and/or fittings to mate right up to my loader's hard piping. Now my loader has float on the arms, regenerative cycling on the dump and provision for power beyond when I'm ready to make a grapple and need a power source for it.
My ZL-30 loader has some other issues, like bad geometry on the bucket cylinders that I need to correct when I replace the cylinders I bent. They just didn't adjust the geometry when they made the switch to a QA bucket, so the cylinder rods get flexed over the end of the arms when at full uncurl (dump). It will take some major cutting and welding, but I can correct that and get a bit more bucket curl while I'm at it. At that point it will be just fine.
You might want to take a look at your loader's bucket cylinder rods when they're at full uncurl to see if they're doing the same as mine. That issue sets them up for bending later, I found out the hard way. You can do a simple correction by just welding a hard stop on the bucket mount to prevent the over-travel that flexes them.
Use bonded washers – the steel washers with the rubber bonded in the holes. They worked for me until i finally got rid of the POS valve and bought a better one from Ronald at Ranch Hand Supply. Not cheap, but well worth it – the loader now operates the way it should and has float, too.
I looked at that some Bob, and it looks to me as though it should be no change. The OEM setup has the cylinder operating basically parallel to the loader arms, though at the very end of the dump stroke they actually cause the rods to flex when the hit the arms. Going to the shorter cylinders would actually eliminate the end-of-stroke flexing, I think, as the closer attachment point would allow the rods to just clear the arm ends at full extension. Even if not, I could raise the attachment point a half inch ad achieve the clearance that way.
My objective on the new mounts would be to avoid the flexing in the old arrangement and also to use the cylinder stop to limit the bucket travel on extension. The OEM setup, using shortened rods (well, actually extended cylinders and a short rod) looks to have been done that way to put the attachment point at the “bend” in the arms and use the gusset plate as the attachment point. The OEM cylinders actually have a couple inches more travel than needed, so they try to force the bucket on full extension, flexing the rods over the end of the arms. By making a new attachment plate part way down the arms I could set it so that the curl cylinders were at full extension when the bucket was at full dump, thus using the cylinder stops to prevent the rods from flexing over the end of the arms. I think.
If I use attachment plates that are sufficiently wide, I don't see any issues of excessively concentrating forces in the middle of the loader arms. The geometry of the bucket curl shouldn't be changed and it should function as before, minus the tendency to flex the rods at full extension. Again, I think. I'm not an engineer, obviously, just a poor broke-down old blacksmith with a thin wallet.
