Off to the dealer
I haven’t ranted about the 328 skid steer I also inherited from dad. On the surface this thing should be great for clearing brush, fencerows, moving stuff around; it has a heater, A/C, solid cab. We have several shear and grapple attachments for just that. This thing has been a giant, multi-year pain in my ass. I think it worked precisely for two weeks, then sat for a few months and fell apart. This is the first piece of heavy equipment I’ve ever been responsible for, and I’m learning as I go along. And oh what a learning experience it has been. It’s a pretty pricey piece of kit so I’d like to keep it working for the day we do sell it when I’m done with it.
Battery replacement saga
The first issue was that over one winter two years ago the battery had completely died, would not hold a charge at all. The problem here is that in order to physically remove the battery, the boom must be raised to create enough clearance. Without being able to start the engine there’s no way to raise the boom, and there was no conveniently located tree to winch from. Being a hefty diesel engine, I learned you can’t just throw a battery charger with a 100 amp boost on it nor can you use one of those lithium ion boosters. Neither delivers enough juice when the main battery is dead-dead (in fact it probably works as a short and consumes load).
This leads us to an external booster battery. I got the new battery, wheeled it over, disconnected the old battery, and used some “heavy duty” 1 AWG jumper cables to from the battery cables to the new battery. This didn’t work either, and in fact the current draw nearly melted the jumper cables. Looking at the arc burns on the battery posts, it’s clear the jumper cables weren’t actually making much surface contact, just a few points where the teeth were biting. Further it was clear very little cable was actually making contact with the clamps and only one set of teeth were actually connected to the cables. It’s all a sham.
Homemade 1000 amp jumper cables
Because I only have so much time to devote to issues during trips, I was going to solve this once and for all on the next trip. I used some leftover 1/0 cable from truck amplifier work, ordered some expensive, mega-sized 1000 amp battery clamps from a outfit in Alaska, and built my own booster cables. It was shorter, larger gauge wire, both sides of the jaw carried load, and had much more grippy surface. I put some old terminals on the new battery posts to provide more surface area for the clamps to bite, and clamped the other end to the loader’s battery terminals.
328 started from external booster battery
It worked! I was able to start the skid steer completely off the new battery using the new mega booster cable as it sat on the ground next to it. I was finally able to raise the boom and put the new battery in its rightful place.
It was super frustrating how many people told me “why can’t you just use a battery booster” and “why can’t you just use starter ether”.
The thing definitely now has a battery tender hooked to it all the time, I’m not going through this again.
Stuck boom
The next problem was the electro-hydraulic controls. At some point (I think before battery change) it developed a HCU 91.03 “throttle sensor out of range high” code. I could drive the unit around all day no problem, I could curl the bucket/forks up and down all day long no problem. I could raise the boom up … but could not lower it. As soon as I commanded the joystick to lower the boom the status board would immediately beep and display “Check service code”. I could raise the boom up even more, but still not lower it.
Video of control failure:
The fact that the curling worked and there was no jerky behavior lead me to believe this was probably not hydraulic related. In fact, there for a while if I cleared the codes and ever so gently nudged the joystick down, I could occasionally lower the boom, some times slowly, sometimes bit by bit; go too fast and the code warning would pop up. My hunch was the boom control was software linked to the throttle sensor, without a good reading it wouldn’t work.
Because the boom was stuck in the air I was hesitant to call somebody to come get the thing to work on as it might be too high on a trailer, and didn’t know of any mobile mechanics that could look at it.
I did eventually learn that in my particular 2009 328 unit the manual boom release was under the seat, buried under some leaves and dust. Prior to that everything I’ve seen showed a T-handle over by the left footwell which mine did not have.
328 manual boom release under seat
I also learned the boom lock is not some sort of hydraulic lockout, but an actual 2″ pin that slides out of the side of the cab that the boom rests on. This makes it safe to work on the unit when the boom is in a raised position, so there’s not a chance of pressure bleeding off and it coming down unexpectedly. Of course somebody had monkeyed around on this before I did and the boom lock lever inside the cab wasn’t even attached to the boom lock. I had to get in the back and carefully thread on washers and cotter pins to finally get it working like it should.
So this problem went on for over a year. I actually bought a bootleg copy of the 4″ thick John Deere 325-328 TM2191 “Operation & Test Technical Manual” to try to learn what the real problem even was and diagnose it myself. By the book, to get at the throttle sensor or even its cabling, required removing the A/C compressor and alternator, since the sensor was behind the alternator.
John Deere TM2191 manual
On one trip I had poked around at the throttle sensor cabling and actually had cleared the code for a while and the boom was working .. until it didn’t. I actually used it like this a couple days to move some stuff around, I could still tilt the forks to pick stuff up and shove it into the dumpster without needing to raise the boom.
Giving up
Eventually last fall I gave up, I just didn’t have time to tear into the unit any more and needed to get it working. My trips to Oklahoma can only last about a week and if I burn 1-2 days taking off the alternator, poking around, anticipating god knows what else comes up, that is quite expensive. I called around and found a John Deere dealer an hour away that could either send a mobile mechanic or come pick it up at a quite reasonable rate. What I thought might be a $600-$1000 job turned into something else.
First they sat out diagnosing the joystick. They said the joystick was intermittent, had to be replaced, and it would be around $4200 all said and done to replace it. Fuck that. I told them I couldn’t do it, just fix the throttle sensor issue, betting that’s probably the problem.
Then they said the throttle sensor problem was due to a sticky foot throttle pedal, and the hand throttle and foot throttle are linked together. Because it was sticking, the sensor couldn’t properly reset and would need a new foot throttle for $1200 parts+labor. Because I don’t use the foot throttle I asked if they could just disconnect it, they said it wouldn’t work that way. Fine, replace the pedal.
Between all the diagnosing labor and parts, the bill came out to $4700. $3200 of that was labor of diagnosing the joystick and then the throttle sensor. And it still didn’t fix the damn problem that started it all, not being able to lower the boom. I had asked if fixing the throttle sensor fixed the boom issue and they said it did, but I didn’t believe them until I saw it myself. Funny enough the transport fee was only $50 which felt like a bargain.
After three months they finally brought it back to me. On my last trip to Oklahoma last week the first thing I did was started it up to check it out. HCU 91.03 code is indeed gone now, but now I have new JSR 2660.14 and 2661.14 joystick codes that weren’t there before and the fucking boom still doesn’t work. Now even curling the bucket is hit and miss.
SIGH.
Depending how you look at it, it’s in worse shape now than before I had it worked on. The TM2191 says the 2660 codes are “joystick redundancy” like there are dual X/Y axis signals it expects and if they’re mismatched it doesn’t work. It says the only solution is to replace the joystick, that’s it. Now to find a joystick. Apparently they’re sealed units, not a whole lot to be fiddled with. I am super curious to crack mine open and take a look, is it a dodgy connector, a solder joint that needs to be re-flowed, or what.
There’s not much on the internet about the joysticks. Going by FB group posts it seems the joysticks can be replaced and recalibrated without a dealer. I did find one video by Paul’s Equipment Repair that actually covers some real electrical diagnostics that I need to re-watch.
