How much has maintenance changed in the last 30 years? A great deal. Once, an oil change and topping up the radiator was enough, nowadays all the components, even the electronic ones, require servicing. More time is needed and some functions are automatic, but maintenance in the company has become very difficult…
Ottavio Repetti
The means change and so does the way of caring for them. After all, it could not be otherwise, given the speed with which work in agriculture is changing. The cars registered in the last five years do not resemble those of 30 or 40 years ago, except in their style (and even in it, broadly speaking). The technological equipment is unparalleled and the same goes for the engine and transmission specifications. All this means that maintenance requirements are also profoundly different.
Minimal, Reduced, Automatic
If the interventions were already important on tractors of the last century, they are even more so today. For purely mechanical machines an oil change – even with a certain flexibility on the number of hours worked – was more or less enough to avoid the worst trouble. Oil, filter if necessary, half a bucket of water in the radiator and you could start again. Today, all components, including electronic ones, must be given the right amount of periodic attention. Needless to mention the importance of replacing or topping up oils and various fluids, and the list of interventions certainly does not stop there. The transmission, oil aside, requires periodic calibration of the clutches and synchronisation of the ratios, the air conditioning needs to be topped up. Radiators, due to the high temperatures reached by the engine, need to be blown much more frequently than in the past, and it is hardly worth mentioning that their number and size have multiplied. Besides the engine one, we have one for the hydraulic oil, another for the transmission oil, a fourth for the engine oil, then again for the intercooler, diesel and air conditioning.
This increased need for attention conflicts with the reality of modern work, which is made up of increasingly tight deadlines and machines that work longer and longer hours, so the willingness to keep them in the workshop to do good maintenance is drastically reduced. It is also for this reason that manufacturers have tried to simplify customers’ lives by reducing or automating certain tasks.
Maintenance time gets longer
The standard until the late 1990s was 350 hours for engine oil, 500 for the gearbox and hydraulics. Radiators, when necessary. Today, thanks to the development of new fluids, these times have been considerably expanded. Engine oil is now replaced, on the latest generation of machines, every 500 hours, while for other fluids we have reached 750 and even 1000 hours between changes. For many machines, this means working for a year without the need for an oil change and this is obviously a great advantage, if only because it allows machine downtime to be postponed until the winter season, when there is more time and most tractors are not working.
This delay is made possible by the development of special oils with a synthetic base and high-level specifications, thanks to which the risks of shearing, i.e. breaking the protective film that the oil forms on gears and other parts to be preserved, are reduced. Their cost is clearly higher than that of common oils, made with standard bases that are very often regenerated, but they provide greater protection and less need for replacement.
The tractor takes care of itself
Another solution devised by manufacturers to meet customers’ time constraints is automatic maintenance for some specific components. On many pieces of equipment (balers, but also combine harvesters and forage harvesters) we have, for example, centralised automatic greasing: all points to be greased are connected to a pump that is fed from a large grease tank. The operator, instead of greasing individual points, wasting time and at the risk of forgetting some particularly difficult to reach, only has to fill the tank when it is about to empty.
Entirely different operation, but comparable time savings, for reversible fan cooling systems. In this case, the blowing of the radiators is automated: special fans with adjustable blades can reverse the flow of air, pushing it outwards rather than drawing it inwards. In this way, the operator can periodically get rid of pollen and plant debris clogging the bonnet grilles and the radiators themselves. The operation, on the latest generation machines, can also be automated: just set on the terminal the frequency with which you want the fan to change from suction to blowing. A frequency that, of course, can vary depending on the work done, since between the distribution of wastewater and the baling of hay, to give two extreme examples, there is a considerable difference in radiator clogging rates.
The spare parts issue
It is impossible to discuss maintenance without addressing the issue of spare parts. As our readers are well aware, there are essentially two types: original and non-original. The former are marked (and guaranteed) by the machine manufacturer, are mainly bought at the dealership and are invariably more expensive than the generic spare part, otherwise known as compatible. The price difference is not always high, as manufacturers periodically launch campaigns to build customer loyalty and encourage them to buy parts from their dealer network. They do this in order to sell more spare parts but mainly to give a helping hand to dealers, who often make more money with after-sales service and assistance than with the sale of new ones.
Equivalent spare parts (another synonym for generic) are of course not all the same: there are better and worse ones. Some are produced by the same spare parts dealers that supply the tractor manufacturers, so they are in every way identical to the original, except for the brand name on the box. They cost less than the original, but not much less. Then there are mid-range parts and others, made mainly in the Far East, which have popular prices but lower quality.
Spare parts are primarily found at dealers, and in this case are generally original. Generally, but not always: a dealer may have, next to the original spare parts, a line of cheaper products, perhaps for machines that are already old or that only work a few dozen hours a year.
Timing matters
The battle for spare parts is played out not only on price, but also on lead times: those of delivery and those – in the sense of years of life – of the tractor. Let us start with the latter. A new tractor is covered by warranty and the warranty requires that servicing is carried out by authorised workshops and with original spare parts. So for the first two years everyone will use the spare parts specified by the manufacturer. Once the warranty is over – assuming there is no warranty extension, which buyers are increasingly resorting to – you enter the free market. Insiders explain that there is a general tendency to use original or at least high-quality spare parts for newer machines, partly as a consequence of their value. After a decade, one tries to save money where one can, even on spare parts. It would make no sense, after all, to mount a top-of-the-line part to a tractor from the 1980s. It is based on this that many manufacturers offer a specific line of components, designed specifically for older machines. They are equivalent and as such cost less than the original but are still guaranteed by the manufacturer.
Back to the timing, however. We have mentioned that of the tractor; the delivery times remain to be dealt with. Logistics has worked wonders in this area. Whereas a few decades ago deliveries were not guaranteed until three days after the order was placed, today almost all spare parts dealers and many dealers are able to supply the part within 24 hours of the request, if the request is made within a certain time. At worst, the replacement arrives within 48 hours of the order: a practically standard time for those unfortunate enough to live in marginal areas or on islands.
In order to achieve such tight delivery times, parts sellers have invested in warehouses, which are now largely automated, and in double and triple work shifts, as well as in specific agreements with delivery couriers. Competition, once again, has favoured consumers (of parts, in this case): it was enough for a few major foreign groups to start reducing delivery times for all parts dealers, foreign and domestic, to be forced to adapt.
Oil with a thousand lives
A very particular type of replacement is oil, and its replacement is the most classic of maintenance, as well as being one of the few that a farmer can carry out on his own, even on the latest generation machines. For almost everything else, diagnostic software and special keys are required, which are not available on the market or are available at costs that make DIY maintenance uneconomical.
What is written about original or compatible spare parts also applies to oil. All dealers sell the manufacturer’s recommended oil, but very often they also have lines of generic oils. This does not mean that they are of low quality, as they are produced by the same companies that make the oils branded by the various tractor brands. In recent years, developments in research have made it possible to have oils with durations almost twice as long as in the past and to defer interventions over time. The quality of the oil also affects the allowable delay for replacement. Let us assume that the time comes for an oil change, but during those very weeks the tractor is engaged in work that cannot be interrupted. How long can the change be delayed without risking damage to the engine? It depends, precisely, on the oil. A good quality product, using mainly synthetic and virgin bases, can withstand a hundred hours of work longer than the recommended replacement time without great risk. A low-priced – and consequently low-quality – oil faces a higher risk of shearing off and thus failing to lubricate heavily rubbing parts, such as the pistons inside the cylinders, for example, or the bushings on the shaft.
An oil is made up of bases and additives. The former are crucial in determining its quality and durability over time. Virgin bases are clearly the best, and synthetic ones are even better than natural ones. However, many oils use regenerated bases: they are obtained from the recovery and new refining of used oils: a supply chain in which Italy leads the world. Giving new life to oil, purifying it of diesel residues, various impurities and water molecules, is a way to reduce the use of oil raw materials and recover waste that would otherwise have to be incinerated. However, the destination of these renewed oils is important: there are areas, such as hydraulics, where resistance to very high temperatures and shear forces are not needed, while in the engine, especially modern ones, products with high performance and above all stable over time products are needed.
This is also why research in recent years has led to the development of increasingly specific oils. Each tractor manufacturer has them made according to its own requirements, designed not only for the brand, but sometimes also for a specific series of tractor. Stage V engines, for example, require different characteristics than the old 6-cylinder Stage III engines. Similarly, a CVT transmission oil has different specifications from one that will lubricate a powershift transmission.
Research has not only involved oil. The coolant is also very different from the mixture of well water and a drop of antifreeze that was common to find in radiators until the 1980s. At the time, its temperature hardly exceeded 90 degrees, while today, between Egr and other measures to contain pollution, internal temperatures are such that the coolant rises above 110 degrees. Without a correct mixture of specific formulas, it would start to boil well before that. It is also for this reason that by now, alongside concentrated liquids, to be diluted in the company, ready-made product cans are increasingly common, mixed in the right doses and containing demineralised water, which leaves no residue in the radiator.
Digital changes everything
Technology has therefore profoundly changed the conditions, timing and nature of maintenance; however, the digital revolution promises even more radical changes, especially thanks to telemetry. That is to say, the remote control of machines, constantly connected with the headquarters and, with the owner’s consent, with the workshop.
It is a revolution, in truth, that has already begun and whose boundaries are beginning to be glimpsed. First of all, every machine less than ten years old shows, on a special page of the operating system, how much time is left until the next maintenance is due and what interventions need to be carried out. As the deadline approaches, a warning message appears on the monitor: it is impossible not to see it, not least because you cannot continue working without checking it.
All of this, however, happens on board the machine, as if it were an isolated entity. Which, for many machines, is no longer true, as the aforementioned telemetry constantly connects them with other places. Therefore, the hours until maintenance is due and the materials needed to carry it out are also visible at the company’s premises and in the workshop. Indeed, thanks to this information, mechanics can plan their work more easily: when the time for maintenance approaches, they phone the customer and arrange an appointment, so that downtime is reduced to a minimum. For certain brands, the operator can also book maintenance from the tractor: at the push of a few buttons, he can order the necessary spare parts and contact the service department that will install them (unless the farmer wants to do it himself, of course). It is clearly a way of encouraging the use of original spare parts and the use of official workshops, but it works and relieves the farmer of a problem.
This applies to scheduled maintenance, which takes place once a certain number of hours has been reached. The real revolution, however, already in embryo, is predictive maintenance or servicing: based on the hundreds of sensors in tractors and harvesting machines, operating systems, now equipped with an early form of artificial intelligence, can predict the wear of certain components that do not require replacement every X hours. For example, a bearing or a clutch. The processes carried out, the intensity of that work, the temperatures and the average engine load can make it possible to predict with a small margin of error when a gear or bearing will be at the end of its life, so that it can be replaced before it breaks down, resulting in machine downtime and likely damage. How far removed from all this is the farmer who dumps oil into an old drum cut in half, under the roof of the barn, and tops up the radiator with well water.
