Hi, David from Messick's here with today's three-minute Thursday. Today we're going to talk about some helpful hints and tricks that'll help you with your sprayers out in the field. 

There are two basic types of pumps on pull-type sprayers. One is going to be a centrifugal PTO pump driven by your PTO shaft on your tractor. Another is going to be a hydraulic pump driven by the hydraulics on your tractor. One thing we often see when it comes to PTO centrifugal pumps is a failure down here on the pump. The main cause of that is that there's a grease zerk here that isn't greased very often. 

We've already removed the shields here so we can show you where that grease zerk is. If we just come around to this side, sometimes you'll find a small-cap on it like this one had, but right here is going to be your grease zerk. If you put some grease in that you keep your pump going nice and strong. We're standing here in front of a brand new 2019 fast, big wheel 750 pull-type sprayer. Sometimes what you'll find is that your nozzles will start to leak even after you've shut the boom off. 

Now, these are no drip triple nozzle bodies, which means as soon as you shut off your flow to the boom that these should stop dripping, but sometimes they don't. Why is that? Well, over here we have a little bit of a pressure regulator, if you will. These guys are pressure regulated up to 10 PSI. There's a diaphragm and it's spring-loaded in here. Every once in a while we'll get a piece of dirt stuck in here, and as a result, your nozzle will drip when it shuts off instead of closing that diaphragm. 

Simply take it out, pop out the diaphragm, blow it out, clean it out, put it back in, screw it tight, and you should be good to go. Sprayers are equipped with electric ball valves. The nice thing about electric ball valves is they're very easy to install and uninstall from your sprayer. If you have a five sections sprayer and four other sections are spraying, but one is not, you could have a ball valve problem. It's very simple. 

You pull a pin, you unhook the wiring harness from the back of the ball valve, and you can swap this ball valve out on your section that isn't spraying with one of your other ball valves, and if that section now starts to spray, you know you have a bad ball valve and you can get a simple fix in a matter of a couple of minutes and be back in the field. That'll do it for this week's three-minute Thursday. 

If you're in the market for a new sprayer, if you need some parts or need some service help, if you need some technical assistance and just have some questions, feel free to give us a call at (800) 222-3373 or visit us online at messicks.com.