It looks like John Deere has allowed you to fix your own property. Are you qualified to re-boot your tractor, and will other companies follow suit? Scott has the dirt.
It looks like John Deere has allowed you to fix your own property. Are you qualified to re-boot your tractor, and will other companies follow suit? Scott has the dirt.
34 replies on “Deere John…”
I sure hope you guys are right and this becomes a trend. The nickle and dime stuff happened a long time ago. Remember when banks actually wanted your business instead of being a burden to them that they need to be compensated for? It reached what I thought was the zenith when they charged you for going inside to do your transaction. Silly me, oh how wrong I was. Now they want to charge you if you don’t do your banking on-line.
Bill, the reason a failed timing belt will destroy an engine is because it is a high performance, high compression engine. In order to get that high compression, the top of the piston has to come too close to the top of the cylinder (the head) to allow for valve clearance. The engine only works if the piston and valves are in sync so that they don’t get in each other’s way. A low compression engine doesn’t have this problem, so that if your timing belt goes out on it, you simply coast to a stop with your engine still intact, because the piston and valves have enough space to not get in each other’s way!
Not long after my husband and I married, he showed me how to use a drill and a jigsaw because I was too impatient to wait for him to come home from work and do simple household chores.
Since then, we have acquired a drill press (my Valentine’s Day present), a compound miter saw (my birthday present), a nail gun (because I wanted one) and a tile saw (our anniversary present). I’ve hung shelves and window treatments, swapped out electric outlets, installed a tongue and groove treatment on the ceiling of my craft room, repaired drywall and on and on. I enjoy looking through the tool aisle at a hardware store every bit as much as shopping for home decor.
I think everyone (men and women) should learn basic home and car maintenance. Not only does it save money, the satisfaction of doing a job yourself is, like Scott said, something you just have to experience.
Oh, and I also know how to code. 🙂
123456
As someone who is mechanically declined I make a point to do any kind of household chores or maintenance that I’m capable of, and I make a point to slowly teach any of this to Little Bob as well.
And I can teach him what I do know, already teaching him Excel and managing money. Speaking of Excel, I hate Microsoft’s new “Download and play an annual license” model. I still use Office 2010 that I’ve bought on eBay, and am not looking forward to the day that Microsoft makes them stop working on whatever the latest version of Windows they force on us.
Many decades ago (in my 20s) I rewired a lamp and I felt like a genius! From then on I have tackled many such mundane tasks (installing dimmer switches, hanging pendants, wired-in smoke detectors). I moved on to changing tires, car batteries, and windshield wipers. Last year I replaced the power window switch in my 14 yr-old car. The dealer want $400. The part cost me about $125.
I am divorced so it’s just me and my “honey-do” list. And it’s great.
It occurs to me that people who fix things are more likely to be Bill Whittle fans. People who don’t probably aren’t.
Tore the door apart on my Hyundai to change bad electronic lock switch. Took three hours. It’d take me an hour and half the next time. Used to fix, build, craft all kinds of things, but I’m lazily letting others do that for me lately.
I closed a nice little automating business when the company that build the platform decided we had to pay $30/monthly for it.
For years it was buy and upgrade (if you wanted it) about every 3 years. And the update was only about $200.
Having had some really rough times when not much money, I don’t like getting involved with autopay nor monthly fees to access my own documents etc… nope not going there.
I purposefully buy older vehicles because of the complexity you mention with the engines. My father taught me to take care of the basic engine needs, so no going to the now $95/hour garages.
I did go for an analysis once. Needed a new fan. Shop said $400.
Went to autoparts store. Fan $38 including tax. So guess who got the job done? Me.
Both my vehicles are 1999 and Im not going forward. No onstar listening it, can see nearly everything in the engine compartment.
They don’t have remote engine anything and I like it that way.
Just adding the autopay note. These organizations want to pull it out of your account at will even. That is what I hear from my friends, not good enough that you pay the silly fee, we want to control when and how we get it. Lots of arrogance going on.
Absolutely amazing what we learn we can do ourselves when we think about it, ask questions, and take a stab. How many things have farmers/ranchers fixed themselves with nothing more than baling wire, spit and duct tape?
Old Chinese saying: “If it moves and shouldn’t – duct tape; if it should move but doesn’t – WD-40.”
Duct tape can’t fix stupid, but it can muffle it.
If you don’t know how to fix, repair, maintain or build something there is a very good chance there are multiple YouTube videos to walk you through it and you will be amazed at how easy something actually is! I have worked on vehicles and repaired guns with the aid of YouTube and I only took about 10 years for my son and son-in-law to convince me of how good it is. You do have to be careful because not every YouTuber actually knows what they are doing.
Definitely look up Louis Rossman and FUTO. No better source for information on Right To Repair efforts and legislation.
Hello, I’m a pediatric plastic surgeon and repair birth defects in children. Giving them the gift of intelligible speech and normal appearance requires attention to detail and innovating new techniques. It is a great feeling to know that what I do for a child could impact their lives for the next 100 years or more.
Over the past several years I’ve restored my home including replacing all the wiring and adding an island and cabinets to my kitchen and fireplaces to my living room and basement. One of my hobbies is restoring vehicles. I’ve restored a Model A Ford popcorn wagon and replaced all the wood with new maple with rail and stile construction. The 1946 Indian Chief motorcycle, that I restored, scored 99 out of 100 points in a motorcycle show. I’m currently working on a 1961 Jaguar E-Type. After learning MIG and TIG welding and body leading (from Gene Winfield) I replaced several rusted body panels and this past summer I spent three months getting the paint perfect.
I’m certainly not trying to brag. I’m just attesting to your statements. There’s nothing a person can’t do if they’re interested and willing to take the time to learn do it right. I feel that If someone can do it better, then you should learn from them or others who have mastered it, or let them do it. The feeling of learning and accomplishing cannot be described. It must be experienced.
I’m a missionary in Japan, born and raised by missionary parents in Japan, and the Japanese I know (and that’s a lot of people) are almost universally amazed at how many different things I can do. I wired our current church building/pastorate, for example. The key was that my parents never once said to me, “That’s too difficult for you.” They told me things like, “Be careful,” or even, “No. That’s illegal.” However, they never discouraged me from trying. I have lost track of how many people have asked me what my actual occupation is. The Japanese are strong on “Only a pro can do that,” which is what makes me so amazing to them. I am very Japanese in many areas, but that is one in which I’m very thankful to be American!
When Deere and other companies relinquish their grip on repairs, other companies will start releasing aftermarket parts, including computers. “A thousand blossoms” will result.
Apple et al selling “services” is a necessity; they have to support a lot of well-into-six-figure salaries.
I grew up on a farm way before there was anything electronic in the machinery and we pretty much fixed everything ourselves. Everything from welding a busted hitch to an engine rebuild.
That probably has a lot to do with my lack of intimidation at tackling any sort of repair on pretty much anything. I don’t know that for sure but it seems reasonable. I repair things around home all the time and usually am able to make whatever broke work as good or better than it did originally, and last longer while I’m at it.
One thing I’ve learned about fixing stuff is you have to decide you’re going to do it. I have a big centrifugal fan that I want to use to ventilate my generator shack sitting waiting for me to get up the gumption to fix it. I bought it really cheap but it didn’t work and I knew that before I bought it. I’ll eventually tear it apart and try to see what’s wrong with it. At which point I’ll decide if it’s an easy fix, if it’s worth whatever parts I’ll have to buy to fix it, if there are components that can be salvaged for other applications, if it was a waste of $3 and I should just chuck the whole thing or some combination of those things.
The other thing I’ve learned is to not start a project if you don’t have or are not willing to take the time to do it. You need to tell yourself “This is going to take exactly as long as it takes and you might as well relax and work through it”. Getting in a hurry is a mistake that leads to more mistakes. My Dad always said “If you don’t have the time to do it right the first time, when are you going to get time to do it over again?”
Know when to push back from the bench or motor or circuit board or whatever you’re working on and take a break. Frustration compounds itself. If you’re getting frustrated that’s a good time to take a breather.
Like Richard Mann (Rich Mann? Saw that pun as a character in a Larry Niven novel once upon a time) says below, I own an IT company. I don’t know if we provide similar services or not but many is the time I’ve tried the same thing three times and it didn’t work as it was expected to. So I went outside and took a break and while I was standing or sitting there thinking about nothing in particular the solution came to me like a fresh breeze.
Do the best repair job you’re capable of. Don’t slap something together just to get it back in service, really concentrate hard on what you can do so that you never have this problem with this item again. Don’t overlook or neglect the small stuff, a dab of grease or anti-seize at the right place in assembly can save you a world of hurt later. While you have whatever you’re working on torn down and the parts sitting there in front of you consider what you can do to make this problem never happen again or what you can do to make the repair easier if it does.
A while back I bought a pair of ‘vintage’ (meaning old junk) Cerwin Vega speakers. They were kaput, the capacitors dried out, the foam surrounds crumbled to the touch but … The cabinets were beautiful walnut veneer. So bought them for $30 for the pair and went to work. Those speakers cost around $1200 new apiece in the 1970’s. Using 1976 as a reference that’s $6171.88 each in today’s dollars. So I knew they’d be great speakers if I rebuilt ’em and I knew when I got done I’d have an amazing set of speakers comparable to something costing a couple thousand dollars each today.
Not something comparable to a $12,000 set of modern speakers, but something really good at a really low price.
About $100 in parts and several hours of my labor later, I have the set of speakers I could only have dreamed of otherwise. Yes, had I spent several thousand dollars on speakers I’d have better ones than these Cerwin Vegas but … I can’t afford those speakers. I could afford a total investment of $130 to get the best speakers I’ll ever own.
I had no doubt of the outcome and was more than willing to tackle a project like that when I saw the condition of the speaker cabinets. They’re beautiful and now they sound amazing because the tech they had back in the 1970’s is nowhere near as good as the tech in the parts I used to repair them. These Cerwin Vegas are better than they were brand new and they’ll last for decades if cared for properly.
Another project, a small one but important to me, was last week I needed a way to connect, without leaking at the pressures my home water system creates, a two way selector valve to a washer hose. The original hose had failed so I bought a much better hose but it didn’t fit where I needed to connect it. That hose connects to a standard garden hose male end. That’s what’s on your washer hose hookups.
I could have bought an adapter from Amazon but that’s trickier than you might think. I’ve done that in the past and I had to send back several before I hit on the right one. So I adapted (pun intended), improvised and overcame the problem. I used a chunk of high quality garden hose that had accidentally gotten chewed on by the lawn mower last summer, a piece from my soaker hose garden watering system, and a quick connect end from the hose that had failed plus some teflon tape, fusion tape and hose clamps to fabricate an adapter. It works perfectly and doesn’t leak a drop even on the hottest water.
And it’s both sturdier and more durable than anything I could have bought.
The point here is that if you are not intimidated by a repair or fabrication project and go ahead and tackle what comes along, you can handle it. If you believe you can do it, and you do your due diligence, it’s likely that you can. Know when you’re way out of your depth too. A wise person knows his limitations.
I didn’t know a dang thing about speaker repairs when I started on those speakers and I didn’t know I could fix that washer hose until I looked at it and decided I could do an adequate repair with the parts I had on hand.
There are a lot of things around my place that have been fixed that way. I even fabricated a CPU water cooling block mount for the water cooling on my main server that’s sitting under my desk running right now and has been operating nice and cool since I stripped a screw and was forced to come up with my own repair two years ago. That wasn’t even something I could order new parts for, it was either find a fix or scrap a perfectly good, very expensive motherboard.
All of that said, and yes Harry it’s a long comment and I’ve said a lot 😉 … There’s fixing things and then there’s wanting to fix things. I hate fixing my vehicle though I don’t mind working on my tractor, lawn mower, etc. If I was rich I’d pay someone to do auto repair for me every time. I’m not so I still end up doing it but I hate it anyway.
Hey, I like your long comments.
Typically well thought out, informative and interesting.
It’s just my sense of humour kicked in my question.
Like I said, if I did long posts and asked if in ever did short posts, i ‘d say “No”.
And as to reparing things, your take the time and take a break when frustrated are spot on.
I don’t know how many times I got frustrated and had no idea what to do, then walked away, with later my brain working in background, came to the foreground, with me doing a facepalm; thinking ” Why the $%#&@ did I not think of that before.?”
Yeah, I’m not a bit upset about you asking me about my considerably lengthy comments. The thing is, your sense of humor piqued my sense of humor — and whacking my funny bone has consequences that now you have to put up with.
🙂
I’m down in my shop and except for the house there’s no one else around for several hundred yards. ‘Cept maybe a few horses and they’re just SOL. I checked and everyone in the house is watching TV and can’t hear me so …
After writing about my speakers I decided to fire ’em up and pound some of the vermin (I hates meeses to pieces) that sneak in here in the winter. If they leave good riddance to ’em and if they don’t they’re going to be bleeding out of their little vermin ear holes.
Have a good weekend, Harry.
🙂 🙂 🙂
You have a good weekend too.
If the consequences of my sense humor is long posts from you, well, that’s a perk in my mind.
Which just proves my #2 (in chronological order) motto “I am not normal. Normal is boring.”😆
“If you don’t have the time to do it right the first time, when are you going to get time to do it over again?”
This. My dad said the same thing and I have been repeating it for years to anyone who would listen and many who wouldn’t.
My family when I was a kid was big on adages, bon mots, old saws, old sayings, cautionary tales and fables and any other descriptor of words of wisdom passed down through the generations. You’ll see me use them here quite often.
They were right in being that way too. This is how common sense knowledge is passed from generation to generation. It is a responsibility that each generation owes the teaching of to the next.
Very many situations in life are covered by those sorts of homespun wisdom. The adages and old sayings are simple to learn and nearly impossible to forget after hearing them so often. Having learned from my elders I applied these things all through my life. I passed them on to my kids and I can’t help but think that has had some influence on their success.
So when speaking to the current younger generations in those terms and finding they have no idea of the meaning of “the boy who cried wolf”, “look before you leap”, “don’t count your chickens before they hatch”, “a stitch in time saves nine”, etc., etc., etc.,
I am appalled. Not at those young people, I’m appalled at the people who raised them. This sort of wisdom is absorbed by osmosis from spending lots of time with parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents. Every second I spent with my kids I was on the lookout for all available “teachable moments” so that I could give my kids something they would be able to use to their own advancement the rest of their lives.
That doesn’t mean I never did anything but lecture and drill my kids, it means I tried hard never to miss the opportunity to give them the virtual gold I was given as I grew up. By the time I had kids I already knew that common sense was becoming less and less common.
This modern appalling lack of common sense is a root issue to the problems we are experiencing as a society today.
I can state very firmly in light of my experience raising two boys that common sense is NOT something that is hereditary, it must be taught. Those two boys didn’t have a lick of common sense until their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, their mother and I gave it to them. It was our privilege and great pleasure to do so.
If your Dad taught you “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time when are you going to get time to do it over again?” — He said things like that because he loved you and wanted you to learn the things he had learned the same way.
That is part of the philosophy behind Philip Crosby’s “Quality is Free” concept.Hard to argue with it.
I recall when ISO-9000 started as all the rage. Because I had heard it from my dad in the form above, one of the adages from my original ISO-9000 training stuck all the decades.
D.I.R.T.F.T. (pronounced Dirty Feet) It stood for Do It Right The First Time.
The only other acronym that has really stuck with me over time is TANSTAAFL.
Rich Mann pun 🙂 Everyone wants to be me, lol. Re: taking a break, I cannot tell you how many times I stayed late at work back in the 90s trying to resolve a problem. With the issue unresolved, I would leave work and run (fly) to the metro barely catching the very last train and then having the answer come to me while sitting in the metro car. Why?
I’ve actually been following the Right-To-Repair Movement for many years.
The right to repair for farmers stems from the insistence by companies like Deere that they schedule a technician to make the repair, even on something as trivial as resetting a fault code! Waiting days or weeks for a tech, while the machine sits idle, can kill a small farm.
The Deere (or IH, or Caterpillar; lets not single out) customer service channel exists to schedule techs to jobs. The problem is, there can’t be enough techs! Millions of machines in the field, thousands of farms and distant locales, the logistics is impossible!
A lot of farmers have gone to hackers to obtain back-door access to controls so that they could work on their machines. At the risk of voiding their warranties and purchase agreements. There used to be many videos on the Tube of Yoo showing these farmers hacking their equipment to avoid long waits for tech visits, but they’ve all gone down the rabbit hole.
Look up the videos of Louis Rossmann. He’s a NYC computer-repair shop owner who has become a major advocate for Right-To-Repair in the computer field. Fighting against Apple and MS as well as phone manufacturers for the right to repair and modify equipment without falling afoul of EULAs and warranty violations. He’s gone so far as to testify in several court cases, as well as before Congress, concerning the Right-To-Repair movement.
He showcases videos on his channel where he accepts repair jobs from people who had their computer “fixed” by Apple (or others), that were either not actually fixed, or made worse. He records the repair with a rig that shows, close up, the process he goes through to identify and correct the faults, including things like connectors not re-connected, pins bent/broken on ICs, broken solder trails, etc. Very enlightening.
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As to Bill’s story about the timing belt taking out the whole engine:
The real reason for that is that the manufacturers replaced the STEEL TIMING CHAIN with a POLYAMIDE TIMING BELT!! One that stretches and frays and eventually breaks. At which point, the valves stop moving but the pistons don’t. Hilarity ensues, resulting in major engine failure!
The car-makers cover their asses by inserting a small paragraph in the owners’ manual to the effect of “replace your timing belt every 50,000 miles for optimum performance”, or some such.
Timing belt breaks and takes down the motor? Well, did you replace it @ 50K? NO? Not our problem.
Wait, you did replace it in schedule? Too bad, so sad. Not covered by warranty. Sucks to be you. Buy a new motor, thanks for your business…
Not Caterpillar. My dad, a WWII veteran, was a diesel mechanic by trade. He had lots of Caterpillar parts and manuals lying around our house and shop. Caterpillar parts were always available from the local dealer, and were delivered or picked up rapidly. My favorite thing was the manuals that Caterpillar produced. They were a thing of clarity and beauty. The illustrations were hand drafted (no pictures or photos) and were shown in perspective with excellent explanations about how everything works and with actual part numbers identified. He loved working on Caterpillars until his dying day.
Well, then I’m glad to say I was wrong in my assumption about Cat! Nice to know they haven’t fallen into the habit of treating their customers like serfs.
Yeah, I’ve always loved Cats too. If you need a part you call up the local Cat dealer and if he has it you can come get it immediately. It’ll be waiting when you walk in the door. If he doesn’t have it he’ll find the nearest dealer that does and you can go pick it up there if it’s not too far and you need it right NOW. (Needing a part right now is common because you’re losing money when that machine is down.) Or he’ll have it drop shipped for free from that other dealer, or he’ll order it from the supplier if you can wait a day or two for it to either arrive at the dealer or you can have it shipped straight to your address of account.
I’ve used Cat earthmoving equipment, Cat Marine power systems and Cat semi-truck engines and fixed all of them when they need it. Can’t beat Caterpillar.
‘Spot on’ Scott re: farmers working on and improving on the capabilities of their farm equipment. My father submitted to International Harvester, perhaps in the late 1940s, a re-designed hay baler I believe related to launching the bales into a wagon. Within a couple of years IH was using the same design. This may not have had anything to do with my father’s design. He was not interested in a patent or credit but rather only wanted a better product. When my father sold the herd in 1971 and stopped dairy farming, my mother did a functional resume for him and said there is nothing he couldn’t do. There may be those who are skeptical that a farmer even knows what an SDK is, lol. My older brother (154) turned down acceptance at MIT and went on to become an assembler language programmer and virtual machine jock, my younger brother (161) has the most amazing vocabulary, and I, the dumb dumb at 151, own an IT company.
My ‘dairy farmer’ father’s favorite job on the farm was working on the tractors.
Self-reliance and individualism are like fraternal twin children of the human spirit, making this episode and the previous one about exploding helmets work like parts 1 and 2 of a common theme: human exceptionalism.
Video not found.
It’s there now.