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Fotons have a good reputation, generally regarded as a step up from Jinmas. As with any Chinese tractor, dealer prep is a huge factor in how well the machine will perform and how long it will last. If the prep work is done thoroughly and properly, you should expect a good life and service from it as long as you keep up with maintenance and periodic inspections. Poor prep or poor maintenance will dramatically reduce the life of the tractor and cause headaches.
One thing you haven't accomplished with that is determining if that circuit will actually handle the load of the glow plugs. It is entirely possible to have 12 volts reading on you multimeter and have it drop to near zero when a real load is applied. The mulitmeter only draws five milliamps or so; nothing compared to what the glow plugs draw. You might try removing that wire from th ebus bar and hooking it to a spare headlight or some other high draw item and then hook the other side to ground. If the headlight lights brightly when you turn the key to heat position than the circuit is fine and the problem lies in either the connections from the buss bas to the glow plugs or the glow plugs are all shot.
What Tinbender said is the key thing here – a short to ground would pull all the amps the battery was capable of and melt the shorted wire in no time flat. So it is likely that the problem is actually a bad cell in the battery causing the other cells to discharge. I'd try a different battery in there and see what happens.
They're called bonded washers and Tommy carries them. The most common size is 18 mm for the hydraulic hoses on my loader.
I agree – the ball in groove system works fine as long as the balls stay in place. The usual cause of problems is the circlip breaking and dripping the balls. While I've never seen this system used in a vehicle before, I have seen it used in other power transmission applications where the shaft needed to have significant end play in the couplings. I think that's the reason they used it here, as these front ends move a good bit when under heavy use and might not do well with a rigid coupling system like a universal joint.
The balls do tend to wear the grooves a bit, so changing them to short cylinders will increase the contact area many times over, resulting in longer life. You just need to cut some short sections of 8mm rod to about 10mm long and you're good to go. 2″ won't fit, not even close. But just going to a cylinder 8mm long is an almost infinite increase in contact area since the balls contact only on a tangent.
Rob (3RRL over on Chinese Tractor World) did the first ball-to-rod conversion and he did his usual meticulous machining job on it, but another guy did his just using pieces cut from a grade 12.9 8mm bolt and that worked just dandy, too. If mine comes apart for any reason I'll probably do mine the same way as it only takes a few minutes to cut down some bolts and dress the edges on the belt sander.
They're on the head. Look for three things sticking up with either wires on them or a buss bar connecting all three to one wire. If no buss bar look for protrusions with threaded studs on the ends. I there aren't any of those, then you may not have glow plugs.
You have me hopelessly confused – carburetor area??? Jinmas are diesels and don't have carburetors. And what does a tractor in Hawaii need with a heater??? I'm at your same latitude, just several thousand miles east, and I have never wanted a heater. AC maybe, but not a heater.
Nope, you don't check it when running. That may be the amount required if you replace the filter, which adds about a quart to the sump amount. Otherwise, go with what the dipstick shows.
Thanks, but I think I'll settle for just another fifteen or so, Bob. I'm decrepit enough at 65 that the thought of even 80 is a bit daunting. I really did beat myself up with youthful motorcycling, skiing, mountain climbing, racing and other stuff, and the traumas, (gunshot wounds, stabbings, beatings and assorted ruptured organs and joints), collected in 30 years of law enforcement just exacerbated things. It probably wouldn't be as bad as it is if I hadn't been both enthusiastic and just plain clumsy as hell. Sure left a lot of bent and broken parts behind, anyway, most of them in my poor corpus delectable.
How I managed several years of self-employment with no health/accident insurance is nothing but pure dumb luck. While I pay a whole lot for that insurance these days, the insurance companies have paid out several hundreds of thousands of bucks on me over the years so I have no legitimate complaint on that score. If they'd had any idea what I was gonna cost them, they'd probably have just had me whacked to save on the bottom line.
Even in relatively soft dirt it only takes one embedded rock to create a sudden load than can shear an axle. I haven't done it on my tractor (yet) but I did it on a front axle on a 4WD International many years ago. I don't think it has too much to do with the quality of the steel itself, though perhaps something to do with the manufacturing process or subsequent heat treating.
Most all axles these days are a medium carbon steel heat treated to a case-and-core state where the outside is hard enough to withstand abrasive wear and the core is soft enough to resist fracturing. However, if the axle has a relief turned in it at a diametrical step change that can create a stress riser where failure will be manifested under excess strain. Not having seen one of these axles out of the tractor I can't say if that is the case here, but that's a general overview.
