The boom lift cylinders on this Case 430 have been leaking pretty good for a while. I took apart the left-hand cylinder hoping to just reseal it but I found a complete mess. The rod is bent quite visibly. The rod, piston, and barrel are gouged along their lengths, the old seals are ripped up, and what worries me most is there are little pieces of wire smashed into the piston. Here's the damage to the barrel. It's concentrated right at the open end. Deep, sharp scoring. If it were a combustion cylinder in an engine I'm sure it would need to be bored and maybe sleeved. Here's the OD of the piston. The damage was oriented toward the ground as the cylinder sits in the machine. I guess the debris just rode back and forth along the bottom of the cylinder. Here's the face of the piston. Note the piece of wire embedded near the top center in the picture. The face of the gland nut has the same damage. So where do I go from here? I'm sure the other cylinder is the same and I REALLY don't want to drop $1500+ for two new ones from the dealer. Can this damage be repaired? If not anyone got a line on some good used cylinders? I see a few lift cylinders from burnt machines around. Can you just reseal a burnt cylinder and go or does the heat damage the hard parts? And, maybe most importantly, where in the world did this wire come from? It very worrying to think there are bits of metal circulating around the hydraulic system...
Sure that they aren't shavings from the barrel scoring.
might also be from a worn pump... If you know the bore size of the cyl, the open and closed length, the pin sizes, ant the GPM and PSI the system operates at, you might get lucky, and find a pair of cylinders, at surpluscenter.com...
I don't think so. It's hard to see in the picture but the pieces have a well defined shape that's not like a shaving or cutting. They're tiny cylinders like a short piece of wire. I thought they might be from a hose but they look too thick to be hose braid wire. Maybe it's from a broken spring somewhere? I'm not sure what could come out of a pump that looks like this. I'll try to pick a piece out of the piston and get a closer picture of it. That's a good idea about surplus center I'll flip through their catalog and see what I can find.
If the rods are badly bent, this can cause the scoring. TIP - Skid steers are not meant to push with the arms in the raised position.....ie - pushing over trees
Pull your hyd. oil filter and check it. The pieces are parts of the cylinder which are now in all the other cylinders ,the control valves , hoses ,pumps and tank. You have a major cleanup to look forward to. Good luck Bob
Ok guys I need some expert help here. I *think* I found the source of the mystery wire. To make a long story short, inside one of the ports on the bucket self-leveling valve I found some larger pieces of the same wire I found in the lift cylinder. My working theory right now is that the wire was a spring that sat behind a hex head plug on the side of the self-leveling valve and put pressure on a spool to hold it against the opposite side of its bore. Here's the valve in question. The port I found the wire in is the top-right. Marked "IN" and closest to the partially unscrewed hex plug. And here's looking into the bore. The hex head plug screws into that open hole, and I found the wire behind it and sticking up between the valve body and the sliding spool, jamming the spool partly open. The question is, is there normally a spring behind that hex plug? Is that what the wire is from? I found out that this is a Sauer-Danfoss model 1480 bucket self-leveling valve, but I can't find a parts breakdown or exploded view of it. I also found at least two slightly different versions, some (like mine) have a hexagonal head plug close to the "IN" marking while others have an allen head plug there. I suspect the allen head models may not have a spring, because those plugs can't be recessed to hold one like the hex head plugs are. If someone has access to a good one of these valves you would make my day if you unscrewed the hex plug on it and told me that there is a spring behind it.
There is no reason for the spring to be behind the hex plug, unless there is a restrictor or poppet for the spring to control. There is no spring behind the valve fittings in the parts breakdown of the hydraulic circuit. My guess is that it has come from inside the valve & worked through into the port. For some reason the CNH gods don't seem to think we need a beakdown of the self levelling valve on a 430 skid steer. Even the service manual doesn't show any info about it, apart from removal & refit... So, I would say if the valve has a problem, it is not serviceable & will need replacing.... There is a breakdown of the self leveling valve for an 1840 in the parts catalog, however it has a different part number to the 430 model.