So it's like this. Over the weekend I was was discing a winter pasture for livestock with my Kubota M9540 tractor. The left lift assist hydraulic cylinder blew out. I was able to complete the job by making wide turns in the loam field. I had to leave the implement in the field as the machine would not lift it. We lost some fluid in the field and none showed on the dip stick. I decided rather than just topping off the system we should drain what was left and go for a refill with new OEM filters and fluid which we did. On installing each $50.00 filter I noticed "made in China" well that pissed me off! Well lo and behold, after an exhaustive nation wide search this morning Kubota has discontinued all seal kits and cylinder parts offering new cylinders only at just short of $1,000.00 each. I believe this corporate tactic is outrageous and just another attempt to victimize the consumer through greed. So here is where I'm at. 1. Try to find the seals elsewhere. Hercules? 2. Going forward with filters find another source possibly Donaldson? All of this BS takes up precious time! Anyone else feel the same as I do? Or am I just getting old and remember the way it used to be and not wanting to roll over and be a victim?
OEM have for some time considered parts as a revenue source, not as support for their customer. So no reason to sell parts at small margins. They want to limit inventory in stock. Because that’s dead money in inventory. So they only stock the whole cylinder. Any publicity traded company is only interested in quarterly results, not long term . CFO’s are now the usual choice to become CEO. The bean counters are the ones running the business. And their pay is directly tied to the stock price. Welcome to capitalism.
Most cylinder seals can be matched up at seal shop if you can take the old ones or cylinder to them.
Thank you for the replies! Upon tear down I will try Hercules as we don't have a local hydraulic shop.
Which for most companies/dealers replacing with complete cuts down warranty issues with half trained personnel in the shop.
I wouldn't think a hyd. shop would be too far away in Texas.
OEM's should view parts as a revenue source, nothing wrong with that since they are in the business to earn a profit. Without a financial gain there would be no reason to have a parts network in the first place. The better OEM's have good parts availability and inventory, the lessor ones not so much. It is the reason why one OEM is at the top of the list and the others trail in a given area. I've had my Cat salesman take a part off a new machine twice in order to keep us running on a major project. No doubt I've become loyal and we are a small contractor. Free market capitalism creates competition which is good for the consumer. If an OEM or dealer isn't being competitive then find another one or go aftermarket.
I was There is one local place that might be able to help. Otherwise it's 100 miles to a larger town. I was considering a Kubota mini excavator. I think I will look elsewhere. I have been a loyal Kubota customer for over 25 years spending over $250k with Kubota. This really pisses me off. There is a farm and ranch show here this week. The Kubota dealer will be there. I hope a factory rep is there. I will give him or her a piece of my mind. Cat is not playing this game?
FWIW we take our cylinders to a local shop that does great work. They are 20 mins away from our equip yard with normal traffic.
Orange is letting you down ?
You better believe it!
I understand your frustration, unfortunately its all cheap junk these days, the better brands are just a little bit less so. Every brand is using parts made in china, Kubota was actually one of the holdouts and only recently started using filters and other small parts made in china. Other manufacturers (Cat is one) are building complete machines there and shipping them back to us. For moral, political and financial reasons I don’t think we should be buying anything from china but thats a discussion for another thread. I own equipment made by Case, Kubota, and Deere and am lucky to have excellent dealers for all three. Parts availability is usually very good and about the same in my experience for the aforementioned.
I've found my Orange parts to be extremely pricey. They see to want to be in competition with the big Green company that also has expensive parts. I normally do research to find aftermarket parts when I can. I refuse to pay $100+ for a 5 gal pail of Kubota Super UDT when I can purchase equivalant, K rated oil for $50-$60 per pail. I normally cross reference filters to Donaldson or other competitvely priced filters. Slapping a name on a box or a part does not make it any better than some of the others out there. K wanted $1,200+ for a new AC compressor (part only) on my M120. I got the same thing for under $300 after doing some research on the net. QDM sums up these kinds of companies pretty well:
Which models?
307/308 excavators, to start with.
Not familiar with the 307 model however the 308's have been made in Georgia for a while. I think Cat opened that plant back in 2012/13? Before that the 308's were made in Japan. The plant in GA also makes the small track type tractors.
I could be wrong on the 308 but the I ran a fairly new 307 for a few hours last spring that I'm pretty sure said "made in China" on the serial number plate. It looked like basically the same machine as a 308 but with a non-swinging boom. We have a little older 308 at work but I won't be around it for a couple weeks to look.
307 I know for sure is and I’m fairly certain one of the new smaller Cat mini excavators is also made in china. I was looking at one and was shocked to see that on the data tag. For some reason I’m thinking it was a 301.5 or 304 but I can’t remember. Cat does a very good job of hiding that info on the web.
This little cat for sale by Riggs Cat in Little Rock, was made there. Pardon Our Interruption
Video from 8 years ago about the plant in GA. Our 2018 305 is made in the USA but not sure if it's made at the GA plant. Our 2 - 279D's (2016 and 2019) are also made in the US.
Komatsu does the same shady parts marketing. Every 3 to 5 years Komatsu excavator components are randomly reengineered. The form & function are the same, but the fit is different enough to require purchasing the new generation part. Example: the boom-offset pilot control valve on my PC-128 failed. Komatsu wanted $1400 for a replacement valve. The sales rep went out of his way to inform me that if my machine were a newer Komatsu, that the replacement valve costs only $120 - but only the 1400 dollar valve will fit my older machine. There is absolutely ZERO reason for Komatsu to have redesigned that foot-valve, other than to make repairing old machines intentionally painful on the wallet. I ended up plumbing in a small closed-center motor-spool valve at a cost of 80 dollars new.
I have been 100% loyal to Kubota with exception to my 580M for obvious reasons. Sad to hear Komatsu is playing games. I was going to consider one of their mini excavators. I don't care for Deere's business tactics as they screwed the local Ag dealer of 30 years by requiring them to either spend 10 mil on a new location or lose it. They lost the area to a mega dealer. Going forward I'll look at a Case or Tak mini. Bob Cat is now S. Korean and I'm not going there. No Tak dealer here or Kobelco.
Case mini excavators are made by Hyundai and are not very good. Tak makes good machines but the parts network isn’t the best and parts can be very expensive. As I said before, none of these companies are ‘good’ anymore, you just have to pick the lesser of the evils. For me thats Kubota on the smaller equipment and Case or Deere on the larger stuff, Cat has priced themselves way out of my reach.
Try buying parts for Champion graders. $225 for fuel sending unit and that's with a $25 discount. I think I need a clutch slave cylinder. It's $881 locally but I found one in another province for $695. Still ridiculous for what it is.
I appreciate the heads up on the Case Hyundai connection. Regarding Kubota, years ago I adopted the Southwest Airlines philosophy of buying only one brand. In their case Boeing and only one model the 737 for parts and service simplicity. Many of my Kubota machines share the same filters also. You might be right on "lesser of evils". I try to avoid the local Kubota dealer after they damn near destroyed my SVL90 on a warranty service. It appears it's all a **** sandwich and if we are going to play this game we all have to take a bite. Fortunately all of my machines are pre-emission so that's a plus!
I see the word {loyal} used, Loyal to what? You might see a company care if you were spending 20 million a year. Planned obsolescence that started right after the Model T. Owners of this type of equipment should understand these companies build with two things in mind-their stock pile of money & adding yours to it. The original concept of adding the thumb to the bucket was to carefully sift through your wallet and pick out the $100 dollar frog hides.
In hindsight you are absolutely correct. I saw this 45 years ago in a previous life when I worked for a Cat dealer. That's why I don't own any Cat equipment. I will say this as a compliment to Cat. I believe they were built to last back then. But that was a different time.
I’m not loyal to any brand, but I do try to standardize as you mentioned. I have a Case 450c dozer, 480e backhoe and 1845c skid steer, all with the 3.9L cummins. There is a high level of interchangeability in parts between the machines, and for the most part one set of filters. I just so happened to start with Case machines, but would have done the same thing with Deere. Deere’s small dozers and backhoes were every bit as good or better at the time but not the skid steers. I truly do believe Kubota builds some of the best compact equipment. I’ve had excellent service out of their B and L series tractors and mini excavators over the years. The SVL65-2 I bought was a leap of faith, aside from one warranty issue it has been very good but time will tell. My father has an M9540 and it has been reliable but the performance and usability isn’t as good as the Deere’s IMO. That was his first large Kubota tractor and he still uses it daily but the last two larger tractors have been Deere. For me I try to pick machines that a brand is known for, select the best from each mfg. My second rule of thumb is never buy a first (or even second) year model of anything, regardless of how good the brand is. And lastly I do try to standardize my parts as much as possible. I will wholeheartedly agree though that equipment isn’t as good as it used to be. IMO the 80’s-90’s were the high water mark for equipment that was reliable, preformed well, and had just enough technology to make them easy to use. It’s mostly been down hill from there...
"Customer Loyalty" and "Global Corporations" are two phrases that should never be used in the one sentence. The corporations have just one one loyalty - to make their already-wealthy shareholders even richer with each passing year. And they do that by regularly reaming customers ruthlessly with no lube, and without even a thank you note. I have no loyalty to any manufacturer, and I would them over at the first opportunity I got, just as they work us over. The problem is, they get to work us over, a lot more than we can do the same to them.
Standardize? Try a fleet of 65 tractors covering 5 years of production with X amount of updates, and 120 plus refer trailers covering 8 years of production.
OUCH
It's kind of funny sometimes. I used to always deal with the independent shop that rebuilt the engine for my Cat and repaired the hyd's. on the backhoe. Then they got rid of most of the long term employee's in the service dept. that had good customer service skills. When I took the wheel motor from my skid steer to get the sprocket pressed off I was shocked at the horrible way I was treated. First the new service manager tells me it will cost $160 (1 hour) explaining they have to take it in the shop and set it up in the press blah blah blah. (In the past the guy I dealt with would have done it himself and charged me for the time it actually took. Some things he just did and never charged me like straightening the arm for the rotary cylinder on the backhoe.) He told me to leave it and I could pick it up the next day... and then told me to go up front and pay for it in advance. That's not how you treat a repeat loyal customer who's spent thousands at your shop. They had my parts and I needed to pay in advance? I went to pick it up and it hadn't moved off the counter. He came up and said give me 20 minutes it will need to cool down. It took more time to cool down than it actually took to press the sprocket off. Certainly didn't take the hour I was told and nowhere is there any mention of a 1 hour minimum. I went back one time because I needed a filter. I found reference that the filter for my skid steer was changed to a different number. The parts guy I dealt with was busy so I got a different guy. I asked him what the difference between the 2 filters was. He had no idea and kept asking me which one I wanted. I said I'd like to know the difference thinking since they're the distributor they should be able to tell me that. He was acting like I should know. I figured he'd have the manufacturer on speed dial and could ask them but nope he did nothing to try and answer my question. He acted like I was wasting his time and said do you want a filter or not. I guessed and bought the new number but what horrible customer service. Looking on the internet I found the new filter was 5 micron and the old number was 10 micron. That's something that should be pretty easy for a distributor to find out or know. I was going to buy a new seat for my skid steer from them but bought it elsewhere. Greedy new management can be a good recipe to lose business and customers.
That is not entirely true any more. CASE is building some of their machines themselves such as the 42D. Others will follow, but you are correct others come from Hyundai.
That is good to hear. I know the 7.5t and larger Case excavators have long been made by Sumitomo in Japan. From what I’ve seen they are excellent machines.
Yes the Sumitomo machines are good. I agree that the Hyundai machines are not great. I demoed the 60 sized machine and while I liked the cab, performance was mediocre in my opinion.
Update on the two hydraulic cylinders for the Kubota tractor. It took 4 weeks but I got the cylinders back from the hydraulic shop for $470.00. I'll install them over the holidays. Kubota can bite me hard for the grand they wanted for each. I appreciate all the advice! Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Kubota probably doesn't do too many cylinders or they send them out and mark them up more.
Its getting harder and harder anymore to find stuff that's not made somewhere other than the US.
Caterpillar has been making excavators in China since at least 2006-2007, specifically a 320D. I remember doing a PDI On the first one I ever saw that was not US or Brazil manufactured; like the 330D, MWP/B6H.
Buy a mid 2000's machine and put money in to it and be good to go Problem is financing,but I rather be running every day with cash then broke down at 0%~3%