by Lucas Benning, Vandalia, IL

Things have been picking up down here south of I-70. After the beating of rain we had (some reported 4 inches), we are starting to get back and rolling. Some guys have started in beans and some haven’t even started corn yet, so we have a wide area of things happening.

Have seen a few issues this past week. We had one planter here in the shop that the hydraulic motors would kick out all the time. Put the test harness on it, ran it, and narrowed it down to some tight drive chains. Replaced all the row unit chains and the hydraulic motor drive chains and received a call from the customer earlier saying everything was working perfectly. One thing to make sure of is to lube the chains and use John Deere Multi-purpose lube. It is not sticky and doesn’t attract dust like the John Deere Chain and Cable Lube does.

One other issue is on 2014 planters it will flash a warning, “low EPM voltage,” while the tractor is running. Dtac case 98937 covers this, basically they hooked the connectors up wrong at the factory and we need to switch them around. Had one issue of this but figured there may be a few more.

Setup issues continue to be a problem on planter clutches. Cannot stress enough to check and recheck the measurements of the machine and implement. This will save a lot of head scratching time.

Have seen some issues with GS3 screens stalling out when they load up. The progress bar stops about ¼ of the way across. DTAC solution number 94862 addresses this and says to unplug the display for 30 seconds which is longer than we normally do. Plug it back in and try to reboot it. the next step is to do a field reprogram on the display. I haven’t had to do the field reprogram, the 30 second shut down has fixed the few that I have had.