My Frankentractor- An L235s long journey

When I bought my acreage in 10 years ago, I purchased a 20hp Yanmar with loader and rototiller. Over time I added, a box blade, bush hog, rear remotes, top n tilt, turf tires,....and it served my purpose pretty well, but I always felt I wanted to have something just a little bigger, with some of the features I was missing....live pto...being the biggest.

In 2012, I inherited my father's L225 2WD which he had had since new in 1975. With is came the front mounted McKee snowblower, belly mount mower and rototiller...all well maintained and garage stored. This provided me with a much larger framed tractor and but without 4wd or a loader, I still needed another tractor.

Over the course of the next few years, I kept looking for a 4wd Kubota, with live PTO and a loader. I found one listed on one of the classifieds sites locally...400hrs...live PTO, shuttle shift, looks rough, runs well...for a good price...but no loader. The tractor was an L235DT that had been used as a transport at the mines.

This will give you an idea of what it looked like as a transport.

The next owner bought it and added a cab, 3pt hitch and remove some of the platform.

When I looked at it I saw a tractor that ran well, the pto still had the rubber cover on it and never had an implement on it. It was super-wide (wheel spacers in the rear, and front tires were dished out. It also had an full underframe running from the 3pt hitch to the loader mount and tied into the rear wheels.. The price was right, so I decided to buy and start to look for a loader to mate up with it.

Once I got it home, I pulled the cab off it, all the extraneous wiring, remove the hydraulic valves for what probably was a snowblade and began to work on changing all the fluids. Here it is after that.

And narrow it up is exactly what I did. It was too wide to fit on most trailers (in fact, the dump trailer I used to pick it up was exactly the same width as the tractor)

When I removed the wheel spacers I needed to get new bolts, and then turned the front wheels in to get a much better width.

I cut the fenders off the tractor (they were welded on), cut off the inside of the fender to narrow them up and replace the inside with 3/16" sheet to allow me to mount if back on the tractor.




Since I also needed to add loader hydraulics, I searched for the auxiliary hydraulics block to allow me to cleanly tap into the factory hydraulics.
In the US the current part number for this block is 70050-00279 this fits L235,L275, L345 and potentially more models. When I contacted my local parts counter (I'm in Canada), they didn't have access to that part as the loader it went with was a US part,...however they did find me the Canadian loader for the tractor and the part number for the block was 70060-00234.....and they had a used one in stock for $30.



I had also bought a NOS BX2015 loader valve from them that they were clearing out, which I mounted on the fender. Pardon the hose layout, I just used hoses I had around to test everything and will get a better layout once everything is functioning properly.



I searched everywhere trying to find a loader that would bolt up...sadly nothing could be found, in fact the number of loaders out there that were for a similar sized tractor were few and far between. I price a new Allied loader with mounts, and they wanted $5k+...I would keep searching.

Finally, I came across a John Deere 200cx loader with quick attach bucket and loader mounts...besides being green the issue was it had been misused and the boom was bent. The capacity and size was a perfect match for my tractor, the price was so cheap, even if I can't repair the boom and need to replace it, it would still be a deal.

I have a friend with a 200cx on his John Deere, so I started to measure the geometry on his tractor and the subframe on my L235 to start designing my interface to the JD mounts. Fortunately the width of the subframe on my L235 and the width of the frame that the mounts bolt to on the JD were very close.
Also the height of the top rail of my subframe would put the mounts a similar height off the ground as on the JDs.
I decided to use a 6x4 1/4" L to make the interface, I drilled the holes on both at the same time to ensure that both mounts would be located identically on each side of the tractor. To insure the correct over all width, I need to remove the center of the bracket and weld the faces flush with the vertical arms of the subframe mounts. As you can see, i had some paint from my Yanmar experience to keep the metal and my welds covered. Once everything fits properly, I will remove the subframe, fenders, mounts... sandblast them and paint them to match the Kubota.

North Idaho Wolfman said:

Some people take my advice, but dang that was quick!

Looking good!

Click to expand...

I'm pretty efficient, but to be honest, this has been a work in progress for the last 6 weeks...I'm only now finding the time to document it so I can show what I've done, and maybe help someone else with ideas to get a loader on their old Kubota.

Once the mounts made on to the tractor, it was time to test the loader installation. I purchased quick connects to match the BX2015 valve....but needed to purchase orb to npt adapters to mate with the John Deere hoses (and they were far too expensive from my local hydraulics shop).

In the first try, you can see that the loader mounts and consequently the masts are rotated too much towards the front of the tractor. This puts the boom too close to front tires, the parking stand too close to the front tires and too low.


It also limited the lift height of the loader.

I needed to rotate the mounts towards the rear of the tractor, this was the easily accomplished by trimming the mounts and drilling some new holes in the subframe.




The results were very positive. More clearance. Improved lift height. No rub with the wheels (and similar in measurements to a JD with the same loader)





The other positive thing, was that i was able to drive right into the loader masts and the automatically clicked in place when i got into position

I have made one attempt to straighten the boom, but will remove it again to tweak it a little more. Also as you can see in the pictures the timing rod (which keeps the two "feet" of the loader quick attach in sync) is broken, so I will be welding it and putting it back in place.

Tooljunkie said:

Very nice. Re working that loader to fit- thats awesome. All the loader frames i come across are way to big to rework for my little putt-putt.

Click to expand...

That is what makes it so hard, it sort of makes sense, there are lots of uses for a large tractor that don't require a loader, but anything under 30hp the loader goes with the tractor.

More modifications need to be made to make the loader work properly.
In building my mount interface, I missed one key measurement. The John Deere has much smaller tires and shorter engine block...so the arms on my Kubota are capable of squishing my front tires...I'm going to have to move my mount forward to accommodate this.

The good news is I needed to take the mounting sub-frame off to modify the backhoe mounts I had added (another post for down the road). I'm going to be able to make some changes.