Common Operation Mistakes with Loaders on Tractors

Neil from Messick's here today, out to run through eight different mistakes that I see guys make when operating a front loader. The very first of our front loader mistakes is the way that we approach a pile of dirt. When you have your front loader bucket on from the tractor seat, it's often fairly challenging to be able to look down and know the exact orientation of that bucket and whether the floor of it, the bottom of the bucket, is level as you're approaching your pile. 

What we often will see newer operators do, when they go and they approach their pile, they have their bucket rolled back too far, and that bucket then rides up the pile of dirt, rather than digging into it. Tractors with a bucket level indicator make that easier, but that indicator is optional equipment on a lot of machines, and probably only about half of the tractors out there have that. 

That level indicator can be adjusted to give you an easy visual of when the floor of that bucket is level when you're approaching the pile. If you have a tractor that does not have that indicator, it does take a little bit of time to get used to operating your machine, and having that mental reference point of exactly where level on your bucket is. Another loader mistake that we see is the technique that guys use when back-dragging over top of a pile of dirt. 

Back-dragging is a very, very common process that you're going to go through when you're using a front loader. It's the easiest way to spread out a pile that you've made. The problem that we see with guys when they back-drag is that they use far too large of a rollback angle on their buckets. They curl that thing way around, extending these cylinders very far out. 

Then, when you back-drag, if you happen to hit something, it can create a lot of torque and force that pushes the bucket back up, potentially bending your loader cylinders. There's a right and a wrong way to back-drag a pile. We've got a whole separate video that talks about the exact ways to go through doing that. That's definitely a loader mistake that we see done, and one way that you can quickly do a lot of damage to your loader. 

Having a skid steer coupler on your front loader is a fantastic addition. We treat it as nearly standard equipment, even though it is optional, putting them onto basically every loader that we sell, simply because of the immense world of implements that having a skid steer coupler opens you up to, just scads and scads of stuff that you can pin onto the front of your tractor. 

One of the things that you do end up being able to put onto your tractor when you have a skid steer bucket is an improper bucket. It's really easy to go out and find, say, a bucket off of a large piece of equipment that you can pick up for a few hundred bucks and pin it right onto the front of your tractor and go, and there's pros and cons to that. We often will sell buckets like that for guys to move things like light materials, and snow, and that kind of thing, but we definitely have a subset of customers who seems to want to take that then way oversized bucket and go scoop up a big pile of stone. 

A couple of downsides to that. When you can go and overfill your bucket like that, you could throw your tractor into a point that it's not really stable to operate. As we've shown in other videos, you can often easily lift as much as double the rated lift capacity of your loader by heaping buckets full of material. When you get those buckets up off the ground, you're certainly not going to be able to lift them up and dump them into a back of a truck, but you can get them off the ground and transport with them, and those heavy, heavy weights can make your machine unstable. 

Having a really heavy bucket also takes away from your loader's lift capacity, so every pound that you put out there on the front loader beyond the loader's quick coupler is going to take away from the amount of weight that it can lift. Having an oversized bucket as your regular bucket is a real negative in that way, because it's taking away from the available capacity of your tractor. 

My recommendation is to look really for the buckets that your manufacturer is recommending and definitely have one of those on hand, and if you want to have another bucket around for the one that you think you're going to bend up if you're doing silly stuff with it, or an oversized one for snow, that's great, but that should be your secondary bucket that you're aware may not be perfect for your tractor. You need that one bucket that's really the bucket for your machine that's your everyday, every-use bucket. 

As I said before, I'm a big fan of the skid steer quick attach system and the versatility that it can give to your tractor. It is, however, not a perfect system. There's another hookup attachment out there called the Euro coupler. It's going to have fewer negatives, but unfortunately, it's just not very popular on smaller tractors. On big farm machinery, you'll start to see it, but on smaller machines, it's virtually hardly ever seen. 

One of the problems that we'll see with the skid steer coupler is in the way that it can mate to the bucket. Your back of your bucket in the front of your coupler here basically lay flat against each other, and if you have any dirt or material packed in between these surfaces, when they come together, you're not going to get them to mate flush against each other. That's going to cause the coupler and the bucket not to mate perfectly together. 

It's going to cause, say, the top lip of the coupler not to slide the whole way up into the underside of the bucket, or for the pins not to line up properly on the bottom side. The pins is where this gets important. If these two things aren't perfectly flush with each other, when you go and drop these pins down, they may end up not fully engaging into the holes on the underside of the bucket where they lock into. 

What will end up happening when you do that is that you can end up getting just the tip of the pin through the hole, rather than the entire pin. Then, those tips are actually fairly easy to break off if you're only engaging that bottom part of that pin. Your bucket's going to stay locked on, but if you hit the thing wrong or you back-drag with the bucket and you put enough force down there, you can bust the tips of the pins right off. 

Another place to be mindful here with your bucket and your skid steer coupler where they come together is how these pins engage with the cutout down here at the bottom. Unfortunately, the skid steer couplers standard is not super well-defined and we see a lot of slop and a lot of variety between implement companies, particularly in the cheap implements that we see imported from China. 

Very frequently, we have seen those things come through where these surfaces just don't mate well and the pins really don't drop very far back in. Say, if the underside of this is cut just a little bit too far forward, you don't get a good engagement on the pin. We have had to have shop guys go through and grind out these openings and stuff or cut them larger in order to get the pins to fit properly. Be mindful of that, especially on your inexpensive imported implements, that oftentimes this mating right here could be a little bit better, and a little bit of grinding can go a long way to making sure you have a good fit. 

Another loader mistake we'll see is tires that are not properly inflated. When you go and take your tractor and you lift, say, 2,500 pounds with this big front loader, that puts a lot of strain and a lot additional weight on top of your front tires. Tires are one of our favorite topics here, we do a lot of tire videos. There's a lot that you could do with your tractor tractively for, say, the quality of the ride or the traction that it has by manipulating your tires, by making different tire selections or dropping the pressures. 

It makes a significant difference in the way that your tractor operates. You really need to be cognizant, though, of what you might be doing with your front tires when you have that loader installed. Really be mindful if you're going to go lift heavy loads, put an eye on your front tires and make sure you're not squatting this thing so hard that it pushes the front tire potentially off the beat eventually. 

Having a proper tire PSI at the top end of the range that's marked on your tire or in your owner's manual- I encourage you to check both- to make sure that that tire is good and stiff and that sidewall is going to hold up, support that heavy load. Probably the single most important factor in how well your front loader is going to perform, it's not necessarily its lift capacity, but it's the way that you've chosen to ballast your tractor. 

There's a lot of guys that, when they go through the buying process for a tractor and are presented with additional cost in order to ballast a machine, just start to not want to do it, like, "Why do we want to spend more money on just roll tonnage?" but that's something you really need to consider and you really need to have set up properly on your machine. 

When you go through and you think about the weights that those loaders can lift, having that heavy load hanging way out in front of the tractor is going to cause the back end of the machine to get really light. 

As stout as the rear end of a tractor can be, there is never enough weight back here to support a really capable loader with a full heavy load in the back. Some kind of ballasting needs to be done on every tractor. In the case of this L47, it's the backhoe, we've got a 1,200-pound backhoe hanging off the back of a machine here. On a tractor without a backhoe, you're going to want to make sure that you've got wheel weights, fluid in the tires or some kind of heavy implement on the three-point hitch when you're doing that load of work in order to have that ballast back here. Keep that in mind. 

We don't necessarily always care where that weight is coming from, it just needs to come from something that you've got that in the back of your tractor to keep those wheels planted on the ground and keep the tractor stable as you're traveling back and forth. This seems really simple, but another loader mistake that you would see would be guys carrying their loads far, far too high off the ground. I'll go and start the machine up here, just give you a little bit of a demo. 

Stability on a tractor is really important, and it's very easy to get a machine to a point that it's not exactly going to feel safe and stable and almost like it wants to roll over on you. When you go and you pick up a pile of dirt, you want to be traveling back and forth with that bucket low to the ground. Now, visibility on a tractor is never real great, especially when you have a loader with the arms and the bucket out in front of you. 

Oftentimes, we see guys who are going to want to take that load and travel with the bucket up in the air like this because when the bucket is up, your front visibility around your front tires is a lot better, you can see around the machine, you can navigate around things better. You'll even see us do this sometimes when we're in the parking lot, parking tractors, in order to get things wiggled out, but you never want to do it with a load. 

If you go and you lift that dirt way up there, you're traveling back and forth, you're going to notice the machine- it just doesn't feel as planted, it's not as stable, it's way more apt to roll over. When you raise that center of gravity up, when you have a load, you always want to make sure you're carrying that load at a low carrying height. You can do a lot for the stability of your tractor, if the machine happens to want to roll a little bit, you can quickly get that load back down on the ground so it's-- 

Plant it down and change the center of gravity of your tractor. You never want to be transporting that bucket of dirt any higher than you need to. Another loader mistake that we would see is simple operating techniques. You need to keep in mind where the power from your loader comes from, when you're trying to get into a pile of dirt, I'll demo that here for you shortly. 

If I start my machine up and I approach my pile, and this is a real hard pile, and the ground is really muddy so I have a bit of a hard time pushing into it. When I go into this pile, if I push my bucket into it and I take my loader and pull straight back with my loader, you just see I can't break into it and I can't get out of the pile. Now that's because the loader lift is a much more weak point in the loader than what the loader's rollback is for the bucket, the rollback has a much smaller pivot point and it's going to be much better about breaking that pile up loose and getting a full bucket of material back into it. 

Once you approach that pile you want to first roll your bucket back and then lift up into the pile in order to fill it with soil. A combination of rolling back and lifting is where your power is going to come from. Getting in there, that's what allows you to face that pile and fill the bucket up. When you approach- the wrong way to do this is to come straight in and pull back and use that loader function. 

You can see it's not going to go anywhere, but curling the bucket back is going to break the pile loose, it's going to loosen the material and then using a combination of that roll back and lift is what's going to give me my nice [unintelligible 00:12:20] pile of dirt. Those are eight common mistakes that we would see made with a front loader. If you're shopping for a tractor a front loader should be number one on your implements list. 

It is such a useful piece to have, and can be used for so many things that you never would consider, for many many more things than just simply moving mulch or dirt or those kinds of things, you will find all kinds of things to do with your front loader that you just never considered. It is probably the single most versatile implement that you can have on a tractor. If you are going through the buying process for a machine, we can help. If you have parts and service needs for machines that you already have, give us a call on Messick's, we're available at (800) 222-3373 or online at messicks.com