Following on from last week's ploughing thread successful weekend of ploughing with a TED 20-85 has just occurred. Well, the green stuff turned brown, at least, even if it wasn't pretty.So this is posted to provide hints/comments for anyone else mad enough to try. For those interested, the plough was a 2 furrow 14" semi-digger Dowdeswell. I still feel that this is probably a bit too heavy a plough for this ground and this tractor, and would be better mounted to a Fordson Major or similar. Prior to yomping across Kent to the field of doom, we checked the top link sensing - by levering the rocker back with a tommy bar - the 3pt lifted as planned with no perceptible compression movement on the spring. Top link spring is correctly adjusted (as before) so that it is just possible to rotate the spring with a plough mounted to the tractor, but there is no endplay in the spring. Quadrant adjustment was set very carefully - it is a sensitive little fellow - using a 2 1/8" mark from the top of the quadrant lock channel. Whole lift mechanism now very much better behaved, and 'fingertip control' is restored once more. Everything worked as it should - and we still sat up and begged going uphill - traction-a-plenty - and are still not using duals so suffered from wheel slip, too. We used 1st gear only, in hard ground at about half throttle. Interesting side note - discovered that the lift mechanism would lock in raised position if the quadrant lever was left at the very top of the quadrant for any length of time (constant pumping position?) when turning on the headlands. Only way to lower plough was to disengage PTO, jump on plough, and move quadrant lever through whole movement repeatedly. Tiresome until we found the cause!! Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour in their hydraulics or is this to be expected??
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