Neil from Messick's here. Today is Three-Minute Thursday. Today we're going to have a short conversation about the tire pressure ratings on tractors.
Many of our videos come from things that I find myself helping customers with in the course of the day. This morning was one on a gentleman asking about the proper tire inflation pressure for his front tires. He was going about it looking at his front tires and noticing that on the sidewalls of the tires, it lists only a max psi. It isn't quite like your car, right? You always know if you swing the door open there and look on the inside, you'll find that little plate telling you what to fill it up to but on your tractor tires, it doesn't give you that exact number. It only tells you what the maximum inflation is for that tire.
That's because with the equipment tires like this when you're doing dirt work, you really don't often want a whole lot of excess tire pressure. Running at lower pressures is generally a desirable thing because it makes the ride of the tractor a lot better and it gets a bigger contact patch of that tire, the flat part, it squishes out on the bottom, down on the ground, and the bigger that contact patch is, the more traction you're going to have. That becomes really important with big farm tractor tires, AG tires, when you get up into radials or bias plies, you're making a lot of tire selections for that exact reason, to be able to run at those low pressures.
The funny thing that I was finding with this guy as I was going through and helping him through this process, is he was looking his tires and noticing some pretty large maximum inflation numbers on that tire and thinking that that's what he needed to fill it to, so I went and broke out his owner's manual. Many of was forget that these things exist but
in a dealership setting, we actually refer to your owner's manuals fairly often. We bring them up on the computer to go reference information, that's where we get those details.
Checking that tire inflation pressure there, it gives a whole chart of all of the different tires that could be potentially on your tractor. A lot of these machines, you can have eight to 10 different tire options for the machine. As we're going down through those different tire options, you can find that the recommended inflation pressure on many of these machines is nowhere near that maximum pressure number that's printed on the side of the tire.
In some cases, I found differences as much as 50%, particularly with the small front tires, you can have some recommended pressures as much as 40 and 50 psi but checking your owner's manual is going to show that they recommend as little as half that amount of pressure in that front tire. I went through it and did some spot checking to see if those numbers were going to vary at all if we put a loader on the front of the machine. I also went through and pulled the loader manuals for machines as well, you will find separate tire pressure charts in the loader operator's manual than you do for your tractor but interestingly enough, those charts were the same.
Every spot check that I did showed those numbers being identical for both with and without a loader because of that extra weight that you could be putting over the front. My hunch would be there are some cases where that probably does vary, otherwise, they wouldn't be putting two separate charts in two separate manuals, so they have a front loader on your tractor. Do go to your loader's operator's manual to check for that front tire psi.
I hope that helps. If you're looking at those numbers and not quite sure what to do, your owner's manual is the place to go. Do remember, low tire pressures in tractors are generally a desirable way to operate your machine. You don't want to go so low that you're going to break the beat off the tire, but dropping that tire pressure down is going to give you better traction and a better ride.
If you have any parts needs for machines, you've already got, if you need service on a piece of equipment or you're looking to buy something, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.
I recently bought a used tractor and came to find very shortly after the machine arrived here, that it had a blown engine, a blown engine for the most simplistic of reasons. When you go to change your oil, you open up the drain in the bottom, drain the oil out, spin a new filter on and go to fill that engine back up with oil again. And in the case of this machine, the most simplistic of things happened. That owner, when he went and filled the machine back up with oil, took one of these containers with the foil seal on the top of it, punched his thumb into here. And would you guess where that foil ended up?
Neil from Messick's here to do a little bit of tractor maintenance with you here today. This is my Kubota LX 3310. It's not just a pretty tractor for YouTube videos, I actually do a lot of work at home with it. I'm rounding about 50 hours, 50 hours is a meaningful service interval for your equipment. It is the break in interval, and you're going to go through and drop fluids from your engine and transmission at this point, spin some new filters on there in order to get out all of that initial break in stuff that happens when a machine is new. When those gears first start turning, there's a lot of wear that happens there initially. It's probably the most important service interval that you're going to do. So today we're going to do it on my tractor here, go around and check a couple of different service points and change some fluids. Now before we get started, this should not be the first time that you're servicing your tractor. If you have a loader or a mower deck about every 10 hours you should be hitting those things with a grease gun, going around greasing all the moving points on your loaders and your mower decks. That is one of the primary things that we will look at when we see where on a machine.
