Don't forget gravity when disconnecting hydraulic lines

I had to remove the seat base from my 240U to access the quadrant shaft for the fast hitch. Parts book showed you could access it with the seat removed, but my seat base has a solid plate welded across the top, so there was no way.

IH in their infinite wisdom did not provide a slot on the rear of the base so that you could remove it without disconnecting the fast hitch cylinder hoses. Of course not.

I looked at it, said "tractor's off, nothing should be under pressure, no problem!"

Pulled one line, got a dribble of oil, easy.

Pulled the second line and BLURRRRRPPPPP! Oil going everywhere, high volume at low pressure. In a semi-panic I almost hosed Dad down with old hytran, but caught myself and pointed it at the dog instead.

Then I feel something HEAVY settling on my foot. It's the fast hitch. Forgot about the effects of gravity.

Of course the hitch was ALL the way up, and it was the piston side of the cylinder, so it spewed as much as humanly possible.

have you got the check valve block under your seat? my 240 u has one. has kind of a sliding valve in it to hold the fasthitch in position. i found out that only the i-h o-rings will seal it.

<a href="http://photobucket.com/" target="_blank"> </a>

Hydraulic oil is magnetically attracted to human flesh and as such any person near a loose stream of hydraulic oil will immediately become doused.

When I was a little phart I was sitting on dad's lap on the
loader tractor. We were hauling loads of sand to pour a new
barn floor. A loader hose blew and sprayed us with hot
hydraulic fluid until the bucket was on the ground. To this day I
think of that every time I handle hoses or smell hydraulic. I'm
not sure how mom got that all scrubbed off of me.

You better hope that your dad didn't leave your inherits to the dog! The best thing to use to get oil off humans and dogs is Dawn dishwater soap. We used for years in drag racing to get oil off of drag slicks without ruining the rubber.

I poured new motor oil in the exhaust pipe of a B one time and ended up with the engine in hydraulic lock (my excuse is that I had spent hours getting an old oil seal ring out of the filter canister . . . I was tired). I started taking out the plugs one at a time until the motor would turn over. The crank was too slow to get the last of the oil out so I decided since it was turning over I could use the starter . . . with the switch on. It cranked right up on two cylinders and blew oil out of the exhaust pipe and the plug holes. It got the dog with flaming oil and set the pool of oil on fire under the tractor along with the old towel I was using to mop it up. You would know that my sweet wife and my mischievous son would just happen to be walking up to see it all and . . . never let me forget. That dog never did trust me again. The dog was not hurt and the tractor did not burn and my pickup did clean up fine with no scorch marks. Last time I looked you could not see the oil stains on the brick retaining wall and it only took a few years for it to clean up. I had to explain to my wife that I needed to be that close to the house to work in the afternoon shade and I would try to scrub the oil up from the parking area along with the smut from burning oil. I think that is all gone now and Simple Green did a fair job.

made me remember when I got my first little Farmall.
Being used to vented hydraulic reservoirs on other tractors,
I nonchalantly opened the fill plug on that SC to check the level.
I got a bath and so did the tractor in the next bay....

Fortunately, the dog had a quicker reaction time and dodged.

glennster, your seat base is quite a bit different from mine. On mine there is one large trapezoidal hole that traps both hoses. Looks like you could get away with just the one hose. Of course, it's the hose that spewed all that oil.