We've done a video or two now on John Deere's 303 hydraulic oil, and some of the lawsuits that have been happening out there, suing companies because 303 is simply not an appropriate product for any modern piece of equipment anymore. John Deere's 303 hydraulic oil is an oil mix that is 57 years old. It has been obsolete now for over 43 years. There is no modern equipment that 303 is appropriate in, and any oil that's been developed in the year since is a superior oil for your tractor, and pretty much every way. Yet when you walk into a number of the chain stores that are out there, you're going to find five-gallon pails of 303 floating around out there, and some of the retailers of this hydraulic oil have been the target of lawsuits here over about the last two years or so. The retailers have been losing simply because they're selling an oil that's not really appropriate in any kind of modern equipment.
The reason why they sell and promote that oil is because of its cost. It's a very simple formulation. It can be sold really, really cheaply. It's going to be that kind of stuff that you walk out of the store with a five-gallon pail for about 35 bucks, and it often ends up in older equipment like this. Now, in some cases, you might own that old machine, and 303 is actually an appropriate oil for it. But more often than not that oil was being used in machines, that it just wasn't the right application for it, leading to premature wear and damage of that equipment.
Now that's kind of the backstory on 303, but what's been happening here lately has been interesting to me. So when you're driving into price points like that, when you're walking out of there with a bucket of oil that costs that little, one has to wonder, how are they managing that? Another lawsuit here has just been settled here where the defendant in this case, Smittys whoever they are used transformer oil, line wash oil, and other waste oil products in order to manufacture 303. They were actually draining the oil out of electrical transformers, collecting and buying up all of this waste oil, taking the oils that are used to purge the lines in the refineries at the end of a production cycle and remixing that and bottling it into 303. So what was in that pail was filled with impurities and additives that were completely not the specification of what 303 was actually supposed to be.
Hydraulic oil specifications are very different than engine oil specifications. Engine oils are mixed to some very defined properties of exactly what they're supposed to be. How they're supposed to perform. What kinds of additives are supposed to be in them. Hydraulic oils, though, are completely different. There is very few actual industry specifications for what hydraulic oils are supposed to be. I cringe every time I spin around a bucket and on the back of the bucket, see a chart of all the things that this oil is supposed to be compatible with. You need to know that everything that's on that chart is simply the opinion of the company that manufactured that bucket of oil, but it should be okay and really has very little scientific basis whatsoever. I know enough about some of the oils in the back of those buckets to see times when completely different base oils are listed on some of those different products. There's a rack of about half a dozen different base oils that are used in these products. Oftentimes, they're not even getting the base oil, correct. When they're making those comparisons, much less, even beginning to dive into the additive packages that make those oils perform in certain ways.
Now you certainly can look and say, "I'm a guy who's sells OEM oils, and I have a reason to do that." I'll accept that. Also, I'm always going to want to point out, though, that you take a look at those OEM filters and oils and that kind of stuff, and really benchmark their price against quality oils that are out there or quality filters that are out there. These OEM companies are aware that you're out there price shopping these commodity consumable items. For the most part, I find that they're very actually quite cost-competitive with good quality products from other companies. So if you compare a good quality oil against an OEM oil, you're going to find that they're within 10% of each other, more than likely.
The same holds true for filters as well. You can go price your NAPA Golds and that kind of stuff, and look at how they price out against an OEM engine oil filter, and you're going to find that they're going to price pretty much the same, and most of the time that OEM filter, if you break it open, is a much better product on the inside. If you'd like to see some of that, I've done those videos in the past, cutting those filters apart and showing those differences.
Filter Videos
Napa Filters VS Kubota Filters - Do you need OEM filters?
NAPA VS KUBOTA (hydraulic oil filters) - What's inside???
CUTTING MORE OIL FILTERS - Case/New Holland VS. STP
Another thing that's worth kind of keeping in the back of your mind here. If you could go back to a video that we did with HydraForce here a couple of months ago, towards the end of one of those videos, and I bet most of you never quite got there. There was a time that we took walking through their engineering lab. Now, this is a company that manufactures hydraulic manifolds and valves and stuff that are part of these hydraulic circuits, where these fluids are running through. This company that builds these industrial Legos for your machinery actually had a test rack in their engineering lab that's used to go through and test what happens when you run oil like this through their products, and what their testing shows is, if you look at the life cycle of a component that's in your machine, it looks a lot like a bathtub, right? Where the beginning of the couple years of that machine you might see some early failures on, as a piece of equipment or hydraulic valve first starts to break in. But then that thing tends to last a good long time after that. As that machine starts to age, and maybe you don't change the oil quite as often, or you start running the improper oils and stuff through it. You get this bathtub curve up on the other side of additional failures that might be caused by wear, but also are caused by a lack of maintenance.
As for that reason, I sometimes am confused by the people who are out there and look and say, "I've got an old tractor like these, and I don't really care so much about it anymore, and I don't want to spend the money on the good consumables and stuff for it, because I don't want to keep pouring the money back into that piece of equipment." But we're going to sit here and tell you that that practice often leads to failures down the road that might be more expensive or might ultimately cause you to put that machine out the pasture at the end of its life, maybe earlier than what you need to. So consider that there's a good reason in order to good quality fluids, good quality filters on your equipment. It's going to extend their lifetime.
HydraForce Research and Development Tour
Neil from Messick's here with today's Three-Minute Thursday. Today's short conversation is going to be about a recent news article that I came across referencing a discontinued hydraulic oil from 1974 that you'll still find on store shelves today.
Not everything with tractor ownership is a breeze. One of those things is hydraulic couplers. There are many times that these things can be frustratingly difficult to get connected. In fact, I can't get mine connected out here today. Now, I'm not the slightest bit surprised that I'm having trouble with these things today. When you're dealing with a hydraulic coupler, it's quite a lot different than an airline. If you've used an air chuck before, they're very easy to connect. And when you've got a little bit of pressure in those airlines, it's pretty easy to overcome that air pressure in there. You can always connect those couplers together and compress that air a little bit more. Fluids, though, are incompressible. Last time I had these hoses connected, it was about 40 degrees outside, and I then unhooked them and I've now let them sit out here on this nice sunny day. It's 72 degrees, sunny outside, and these hoses are actually a little bit warm to the touch just because they're black out here with the sun on them. Because of that, we start to get some pressure built up inside of these hoses, enough pressure that I can't overcome that when connecting these Pioneer couplers down into this valve manifold. There's a couple of things that we can do here to try to get these hoses connected.
