John Deere 3300 Starter problem or neutral safety switch bad

Hello,

Two years ago I purchased a used John Deere 3300 Combine from a retiring farmer. I found a serial number:
101064H

Can anyone tell me the year of manufacture?

Anything else I should know?

It's a gas model and I've used it for the past two years, but this year I shut if off to eat supper and now it seem to have a starter problem.

I've put in a new battery, fuel pump comes on, it clicks, but then goes dead, fuel pump goes off and light goes out. If I wait a few minutes I can repeat. If I try to start right away again it won't do anything.

I'm thinking neutral safety switch or Starter gone bad?

I've checked voltage with multimeter and it shows 12.4-14.4, if I hook up jumper cables from my pickup. And then voltage drops to nothing after I try to start. If I wait a few minutes, voltage comes back.

Can you verify the correct starter motor part number?

When I check JD parts catalog there are 9 possibilities:

RE19187
RE62916
AR91813
TY6706
RE50095
SE501400
SE501428
AT18025
SE501436

Where are you measuring the voltage? I would start by monitoring the voltage at the battery terminals and not on the battery cables. If the battery voltage drops to zero across the battery terminals, then it would seem to me a bad battery or almost dead battery. A bad neutral switch would not drop voltage at the battery. If your starter was bad causing a dead short, voltage should come back just as soon as you release your key. What happens if you try to start with gear shift in gear? This should not drop voltage at all. Let us know where you are monitoring the voltage. Do you have the gear shift fully forward when trying to start. My 4420 combine will not start unless the gear shift lever is fully forward. Al

Thank you for the reply. I think I had a 2 part problem. Initially when I shut the machine off it probably wasn't completely out of gear. When I came back after supper in a rush I forgot how touchy the neutral safety switch is and started looking at the old corroded battery as a problem. So I compounded my problem by taking out the old battery and breaking the positive post. Now I had to get a new one. When I put the new battery in I don't think I had all the connections tight enough. So I took the battery out and back to autozone where they tested that it was good. When I read your post and put the battery in for a second time I really took my time and made good connections. Low and behold it started up. I was testing it at the battery posts, and on the jumper cables and on the battery cables and this lead me to wire brush some connections and get it all tightened down. In any case I got the last of my corn harvested today. But the damp corn that was sitting in it for a week bound up the unloading auger, so the belt just smoked when I tried to use it. Instead I got out a corn scoop and had to unload two tanks of corn by hand. Luckily this 1975 model doesn't hold too much. Thanks again for talking me through this before I took out the starter and made a different problem.

Glad to see you got your problem solved. But I sure wouldn't want to unload two hoppers of wet corn out of my 4420, although the bin on your 3300 is probably smaller. Al