John Deere 1640 MFWD How to check your front wheel assist solenoid and valve.

[Music] [Music] g'day youtube my name's lance and welcome to bundy bears shed well today's video or the what we're covering today is the four-wheel drive on my john deere 1640. now i've done a little series on this we did the high low the pdo clutch replaced the clutch and there's a little playlist on the john deere 1640 but since i've had it going and right from the start it's been stuck in four wheel drive so today i'm going to take the opportunity to have a look at why it's stuck in four wheel drive and to understand that when you have a clutch pack that's got a big spring and it locks the plates together so the default for the four-wheel drive is locked in four-wheel drive so and the reason they've done that as a safety thing so if you lose power to the solenoid you have an electrical folder locks in four-wheel drive for safety and because the four wheel drive and the rear wheels the front and rear wheels are locked together then you have four wheel braking and your tractor is a lot safer the the clutch pack that the four wheel drive uses it uses the same oil supply from your transmission pump that your high low and all uses and we know the pump's good we've we've gone through that and with the with the four-wheel drive staying in um what we need is one of two things to release that clutch pack we need oil pressure to release the clutch pack and it gets from the main low pressure system into the clutch pack via an electric solenoid so it's electric over hydraulic so there's a switch on the dash the switch on the dash puts power down into your four-wheel drive engagement or disengaged solenoid and when power goes to the solenoid it opens the tap opens the valve puts oil pressure into that mechanical front wheel drive clutch and that releases it to give you two-wheel drive so so if you either don't have electrics down to that solenoid it won't come out of four-wheel drive it won't go into two-wheel drive if that solenoid magnet is crook you know there's something going wrong and shorted out or something it won't go into two-wheel drive um if that little solenoid valve was stuck a bit of rubbish in it or something like that it won't release into two-wheel drive so i've done a couple of tests on this tractor and i i know what's going on with it but i'd like to run through diagnosing it with you so that if you have this problem you can you know hopefully do a couple of quick little tests and the only thing i've got here that you may not have is a pressure gauge i've got a digital pressure gauge and i like to use a digital pressure gauge when i'm doing videos because it gives you a it gives you a number you can see you're not trying to see a little a little gauge and sometimes with the white gauges with the needle on the front the white flashes out on the video so i use a digital gauge so what our test will be is we'll start at the top and we'll check that we have power to our switch then if we have power to our switch there's a wire that comes down the side inside your left hand foot plate to your solenoid so we can just put a test light there and see if we have power there then we can take the earth wire off the solenoid and test if we have power there if we have power there that shows us that we that we have continuity of electricity of electrical power through that solenoid so there's not a short or it hasn't been broken a wire hasn't been broken or something and we can check that two ways one with a simple um with a simple test light and the other we can do an aims test with an ohm meter now a digital ohm meter or a volt meter omega digital multimeter they're for sale for nine dollars just about everywhere in the world um they're a simple thing if you have a tractor shout yourself one um yeah you'll you'll get the benefit of it i'm sure um one thing with them though is the make sure you have it on the right setting some of these digital multimeters they're that fine that i could test this light here and look it won't be working i don't need it working so i haven't bothered with it so they can give you a my new 12 volt signal but it might not have the guts to do any work there's no amps so you have volts but no power no amps and and volts and amps volts is the as the pipe the you know the the pressure um amps is the flow so um sometimes it is best to use a test light and the light bulb actually puts a bit of load on it so you know you have a good um supply of power so so what we'll run through is one testing if we have power down to the solenoid does the solenoid have continuity and once the solenoid has continuity it has a soft iron core in the center and that becomes magnetic so we can actually with a feeler gauge we can check if that if the solenoid is putting magnetic power on there and then if we have power to the solenoid we can put a feeler gauge near that solenoid and test that the magnet is working that it is okay and we have a test gauge underneath on the port and we can actually test if we know that magnets working and we have pressure down the bottom and our clutch packs not releasing we have a clutch pack problem if we have that ma solenoid becoming magnetic due to the electricity going through the solenoid the induction of that um it might just be a little bit of stuff stuck in the valve and we may have to pull that apart but follow along um i'll i'll take the time we'll try and get the cameras up under the tractor and all that sort of thing and we'll try and do it it's a it's not a hard job it's a it's a layman's job and like all my videos it's to encourage you to have a go yourself um a lot of this stuff isn't that hard but um you're not born smart are you you need to be shown what to do and i was no different so um follow along hopefully you get something useful out of it for your tractor this same thing will work on a mine's a 1640 but all the 20 40 21 40 26 50s 33 50s and most john deere utility tractors work the same um as this you know they need power to release it's a it's a safety thing that's built into the tractors and most tractors in general whether it's ford new holland um john deere or whatever they have this this default of locking in four-wheel drive so we'll work through why ours is stuck in four-wheel drive and yeah come along for the ride okay i've got a little bit of shadow happening the sun's coming up and um yeah it's going over the job a little bit but anyway to work out where our power is coming from for the four wheel drive on on our fuse box here we have one two three four five six seven fuses from the back and if we put our test light here you can see that we have power on there so that's key power so if your keys not on you won't have power there if your keys on you will so we know we have power both sides of that fuse so that wire you can follow that wire across and it goes to the four wheel drive switch here so with that switch down we now need to look for power over here so we have power there you can see the light on off so to send a power signal down to the bottom down to our four wheel drive solenoid we need power coming down there so what we need to do now is drop down under the tractor we'll set the camera up down there and we'll have a look where that wire goes okay we're under the tractor now we've got everything all set up and here is our four wheel drive solenoid this fitting here is the fitting that i've just put there and that's for our test gauge later there's usually just a little plug and there is often this cover sits up under there that i've taken off out of the way so look what we need to do here is find an earth so we can oh probably hop in there and see if we have power coming all the way down through here and you can see we do so that tells us that we have power from the switch well from the key switch through the fuse box to the four wheel drive switch through the plug that joins the tractor in the split here all the way down to the solenoid now this solenoid the wires go across there's three wires on the solenoid now it's the two opposite each other that have the continuity of the of the solenoid so what i'm going to do here well actually i can there's a couple of ways i can do this we'll do two tests we'll put our multimeter down onto the ohms or the buzz ohms and what happens there is when you have continuity in a circuit and the two these two leads touch you can hear the hear the noise so you have an audio visual you have the sound and you have a reading on the gauge so when we say pick a bolt any bolt this one is easy to get to so if we put the earth there now this other wire the power comes in one side the earth comes out the other it goes to earth here so so if we hold the meter up there for you and we earth anything out here you can hear that that we have continuity so if we touch this terminal here so the terminal that this wire would go on to and we touch that there we go we have that audio visual signal so what's that tell us well that tells us that this coil the windings through the coil are good so it's earthed it's come all the way down through here through all the windings and out here and we have continuity there now if you don't have the digital multimeter to check continuity um we can undo the earth now this solenoid should have two um male tags sticking out there one of them was broken off on this tractor so i just soldered the wire you can actually chew all around it with a stanley knife or something like that and try and try and get down enough that you can solder the wire on these solenoids are deer as buggery so we don't really want to replace them so another way of checking this solenoid and we're going to do it a bit differently because i've soldered a wire on here is if you can put this wire on there and pull the earth wire off and put your test light there well that is another way of telling that you have continuity so what we need to do or the way we'll do it here because we've soldered the wire on is we'll undo this earth bolt so that's a bit stuck but that's okay now if we find an earth for our test light and we have power coming from that wire if we hook that wire up and we put him around the right way lance bloody hard to get good help in it on these big jobs and we now test this other terminal here that's another way of doing the same job so we've just tested that this solenoid has continuity so we know that's working so for the moment i'll pop this back in where normally we just plug it on like i said there's a lot of ways of keeping yourself going and that's what my little channel is all about just keep yourself going with your tractors i'll just tighten all this up again so now we know that the solenoid is good and we have power coming down through here we can put that wire back on now now that solenoid we need to have a look and see why if it's working now this is a little little trick that may help you but see this this is a two thousandth of an inch feeler gauge and as i slowly bring it in you can see that it's got power there so if i pull the power wire off put the power wire on so can you see that clearly i don't know if you can or not so we know the coil's working so we know there's nothing wrong with the electric side of this system we know that we have when we put power to the solenoid we have power through the solenoid and there's a little shuttle valve in here so that should pop a little shuttle one way and open the oil supply to here so we know that's working that's a quick easy test now the next test we can do and this might get a bit noisy but um if we put the gauge we'll get that cap out of the way now this gauge will be upside down for you um i may be able to bring the camera down a little bit i'll try for that so what we want is power to the gauge i'll just get this set zero the gauge i just cannot see how well you can see that but there's two ways of doing this we have a front end loader on the tractor you can jack the front wheel up and try and turn this shaft the front drive shaft to see how you're going or we should have pressure here so i'll go around it'll be a bit noisy there for the moment i'm pretty sure you can see that and i'll start the tractor and what we're looking to see is a pressure there now if there's a pressure there and we can't turn this shaft well that means the clutch pack's got to fold it's not it's got a crook o-ring or something like that which i'm sure it's not that i believe we'll have no pressure here so i'll go and start the tractor it'll get a bit noisy but that'll be all right i'll come around the other side here we'll go back under and have a look so we have no pressure there zero and i just jacked the front wheels of the tractor up and you can see that i can't turn that drive so even though we have we have power to the solenoid the solenoid's not opening the tap's not working so so we'll go around and we'll turn the tractor off oh that's better so what did we gain from that exercise so when we come back around here so what we've worked out now is i jacked the front wheels up we cannot turn that front drive shaft with the tractor running and the reason is is we have no pressure here so even though we have power coming to the solenoid here it's not working the valve so that tells us that we need to get this solenoid off we need to pull the valve out and we can see if there's a way that we can fix that so let's hope so okay i think i've got the camera set up way up the back near the linkage arms because this can get messy this little job here so to get the solenoid off i've undone the earth wire taken the main wire out and there's a there's an e-clip slides off so you pop him out and then that will release the solenoid for you now sometimes these do get a bit a little bit rusted on and you can give them a wriggle and yeah they'll come often so we know the solenoid is good we don't need to deal with that anymore and what we're left with is the center the soft iron core here and there's a little retainer plate with four allen head bolts that hold it in now i slid this off before i started filming just for simplicity this one here was that gave me trouble i had to smack it with a hammer to jar it a few times so we can undo the allen head bolts that hold the valve in place and this valve goes up into the housing and is held in there with o-rings so we can we can give that a little wiggle and we should be able to just hop in under there and the retaining plates coming off here now a little bit of rust down there we'll tidy all that up once we get it up on the bench inside and she's playing a little bit hard to get so we'll try and get a bit of leverage under it well and there's the end of the valve there the end of the solenoid valve and up in here this little piece here that should be moving so it can get quite messy this job so i'll try and there's the valve coming in there no wonder it wasn't working that is stuck solid so i'll have a i have a piece of rag ready and we'll wind him up here so when the valve comes out we can bang it back in and i think i'll need these multi grips here once more to just hop on the end there and give that a bit of a pull out now you can lose a lot of oil there because you're in the sump of the transmission so i'll just get my punch here and we'll try and just wrap him up there with the punch jammed into the hole and it doesn't have to be tight we're just trying to stop the oil leakage now the plan from here is this little valve that was sticking giving us all the trouble um and this solenoid here we have to see if we can get this solenoid to work and move back and forth it feels like it's moving up in here but probably just was never going hard enough to push this bell because that was so tight in there so what we'll do with this we'll um polish all this up with a bit of 400 oh probably the finest sandpaper i've got anyway and we'll try and get that moving nice and slowly in the bore there and see how we go from there i believe i'll have a look i think there should be a little spring up there to pop this back into position so when the magnet kicks in it pops it through so we'll have a quick little look at that um that's one little washer that holds it in so we'll have a bit of a tidy up and we'll come back when we got it up on the bench well we've got the solenoid and the control valve your mechanical mfwd mechanical front wheel drive control valve on the bench here and i'll pop a bit of rag there just to try and keep the the glare of the bench out but um you saw me pull this out this fella come with it and this fella come out but that was stuck in the housing so what i did to get that out was i got a pair of circlip pliers x that opened up put it in give it a wiggle and out it come and then there's a spring at the other end there so how i have it laid out there is how it goes back in now i've hopped onto the john deere parts website and i've got a printout there for you of that of how it all goes so this valve here i i polished them all up with fine sandpaper it was about 500 sandpaper 600 and well i think it's an old piece of 600 to tell you the truth and what we need here is we need these valves this is just a bit of enox bit of wd-40 type stuff we need to have these so they just drop through under their own weight and this fella you can see it does drop out under its own weight so look that's fine there in the book it shows the way this goes you can actually i'm going to put a picture up on the in the video about now and that will show you the way all this goes so you can actually see in the video in the in the parts breakdown that this shoulder goes forward and the big land goes to the back so that goes that way you can just see the dark screen and the two o-rings at the back there and then this spring goes in the back and as the valve pushes on that brings it back to standard so then this washer goes on the front of the housing there and in this other section here we're just a bit of wd-40 again i've cleaned and cleaned that and i'm still getting rubbish out of it so i'll give it another flush and this little piston this piston is the one that slides in and out and it it pushes up against this valve here so how it all works is it sits up there like that there's pressure against that valve and when we put power into the solenoid it pops and opens that valve so for a test we can do a bench test and what i'm going to do is put this frame on now this frame there that was the one that had these little allen screws in it so i'm putting two allen screws in just to give us the correct spacing for the magnet here so when we have the magnet we can bring the magnet down over the top of it all we'll just pop the snap ring on look just to hold it all together at the moment and i'll sit that there i'll shift the camera and we'll come over to the vice where we can do it do a quick test okay so what i've chosen to do is with the spring and all assembled here bring this whole assembly across into my vice on my soft jaws there and we'll just clamp it up and this is just the means of holding it in place so what we're looking for now is when we put power through these two terminals in one side out the other we want to hear that go clonk and if i probably zoom in you may see the valve move through this hole here so i'll see if we can come in a little bit oh be nice to stay in focus so i'd suggest and now look what i'm doing here i just have a little plate that i can put my makita 18 volt battery on even though it's only 12 it doesn't matter for a moment and it's just a quick little battery pack for me so if i put the negative here and the positive there you can just see that move and we can actually hear it moving so we know that that's working i'll just disconnect the battery from here now if i take this out gently now what we can do from here if i scoot out again is what we were doing there was that was popping the valve back so all i can figure that it does or how it works is these little holes inside here the valve just sits here and covers the holes and when we open it this sits back enough to let the pressure come through so i haven't i actually i haven't got a breakdown of the hydraulics of this but i know for sure that when this little when this little valve sits up against in that hole there this valve here is just below the shoulder area here so so that's where it sits normally and so what it looks like when you bring that here it looks like normally the oil without the valve being engaged to release the oil it looks like the valve sits something like that so that the oil goes here and no further and then when we open it up we let that move back a little bit well the oil coming through the screen here gets put into the clutch pack here so that appears to be how it's going so i would like a breakdown but anyway we can work with it so we'll put this on there like that and with our assembly here i'll go and fit that to the tractor and i probably won't cover fitting it because you've seen me take it off the tractor but um oh um one of the bad cats really so we'll go and put that on the tractor and we'll come back i'll set the video camera up under the tractor and we'll do that pressure gauge test again because we know the valves moving we know the solenoid is moving so all we need to do is jack the tractor up um click the four wheel drive lever and see if we can turn that front drive shaft and if we can well we've fixed it we're ready to rock and roll okay i've got an extension cord on the gauge and with the engine off we're sitting at zero psi i've put the here and bring that out so you can see a little bit later and with that there we can't turn that front drive shaft so yeah it just won't turn so we are still in four wheel drive so what i'll do now i'll go over i'll start the tractor i have the four wheel drive on we should expect to see a positive pressure there probably about 130 pounds per square inch and once we have that pressure there we should be able to turn the front drive shaft here and that will let us know that we've had success so i'll go and start the tractor it'll probably get a bit noisy again okay so hopefully you can still hear me over that you can see now we have around 130 pounds per square inch get the engine running and i can turn that easily there we go i'll try and keep the gauge in so with 130 down we can turn that i'll flick it off with the switch you can see the pressure dropping away and now we won't be able to turn it that locks solid so i'll put the switch on again pressure comes up and we can turn that drive stuff well there you go we've fixed the four-wheel drive problem that we had with the john deere 1640 it was getting stuck in gear but now by just freeing up that solenoid we got away with it i didn't replace any o-rings just because i didn't have them here to do or normally i probably would replace o-rings as i went but hopefully you could follow along and as i pulled the valve out and as i had it laid on the bench inside there that's how i put it in i put the outer sleeve up then put the spring then the valve and the washer and all that and just bolted it up same as we did pulling it apart we know the solenoid was working well so the fix was or the test was did we get pressure on this gauge when we flicked the switch yes we did and while we had our 130 pound pressure on our gauge our front wheel assist would disengage so we're in two wheel drive so that means i can take the tractor out on the road on hard surfaces now flicked into two wheel drive um when i'm topping or slashing my paddock here before as i turn sharp with the front end loader you could hear it hear it working and binding and that's no good you can't have it doing that full time so now with the flick of the switch on the dash most of the time we'll be in two-wheel drive and when we start the tractor it'll automatically be in two-wheel drive and we can select front-wheel assist when we choose to so by having it so it moves that valve each time well that's another way of us keeping that nice and free in there um but look we got away without buying any parts and look if you can do that you're quite fortunate i believe i'm fortunate to be able to do that so yeah hope it helped you out have a go at your own and yeah stay tuned we'll see what other mischief we can get up to with these tractors you

Channel: Bundy Bears Shed

Views: 4,661

Rating: 4.9310346 out of 5

Keywords: Sparex, lance Maskell, queensland tractor spares, MF135, MF148, fregy tractor, ferguson 35, fe35, mf35, john deere, tractor restoration, tractor repair, massey ferguson, john deere 1640, john deere mfwd, john deer 4wheel drive, john deere 2040, john deere 2140, john deere 3350, john deere 3140

Id: 4_afDolWP84

Length: 37min 52sec (2272 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020