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SE MN | Have one on a Maxxum 150. It is pretty slick, but I wasn't involved in buying it and would have picked something different. The lines inside the booms seems like a time bomb. In 30 years of running westendorf loaders, I don't recall ripping a line off and if it happened, it was easy and fast to fix. Fishing the lines out to figure out what went wrong will be miserable, but if it lasts a long time I will be ok with it. They invented their own hydraulic fittings. Who does that? If you ever find yourself inventing your own hydraulic fittings and you aren't going to space or building a submarine, you are doing something wrong. The quick coupler works ok except the electrical connection smashed itself the second time it was used. Will probably need to make the electrical a separate connection some day. the quick coupler is going to be very expensive to work on when it eventually has problems. If it lasts a long time, I will be ok with it for the convenience. The electric bucket connect is the only part that is a hard fail. Fairly complicated yet doesn't work well at all. No good way to manually disconnect the bucket if you have problems. It uses the weight of the boom to actuate little hydraulic rams, but if it is cold, things are froze, or something is jammed up, you have to push or lift things and bang around to try and get it to move. They would have been a lot better off if they had just put full circuit solenoids in it so that you pushed a button and operated the connectors like one of the boom functions with full hydraulic pressure both ways. It seems like they were trying to do it cheap and they ended up with something worse than where they started. We have 2 loaders each 20+ years of dairy service and the manual quick couplers have never missed a beat except for freezing up with snow. Run a hose over them and go back to work. It looks to me like you can buy the manual couplers and just remove the hydraulic ones. That is my plan if it goes to hell. Will only cost $1000 to make it reliable. In general, it seems like a very sturdy loader but they must have told the engineers to make it more expensive in every way they could think of, including ways that don't make it better than the old TA46. If you can get it with manual bucket latches and save the cost of the electric/hydraulic I would definitely do that. | |
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Westendorf loader
