BX23s and dealer - Underwhelming

[losttrail61]

I received delivery of my BX23S this past Wednesday. Scheduled for 9am, did not arrive until nearly 10:30am, no phone cal, explanation. Failed to bring 3-point hitch. Strike 1.

We are undergoing having new siding installed on our house and due to the delivery being late, I was barraged with a bunch of questions from the siding crew plus had a couple of work issues that had popped up. Did not have time for a full, complete orientation so asked a few questions then parked the tractor behind the house.

Due to a ton of issues, did not get to even see the tractor again until Friday afternoon. Dirty, gravel on top of the mower deck, way too much grease oozing out of every place it can come out. Nothing cleaned. Strike 2.

Emailed dealer my disappointment, but after they closed Friday. Took photos and emailed early Saturday morning.

Received a call just after dealer opened, expressing apologies and offering to provide me a Kubota backhoe thumb at no charge. Also said they would send someone down within hours to 'detail' the tractor.

Ok, dealer is taking responsibility, offering an incentive and going to make it right. Nice, the way it should be handled. So I park the BX on our driveway for easier access for the tech.

Tech calls when he's 20 minutes out, arrives right about there. Cool. We walk around and he is amazed at the amount of grease, filth or the tractor. Young kid, only been with the company about a month. Warning bells go off. I notice two spot on the concrete, one below the muffler (weird) and below the FEL manifold. Again, tractor has only 3.1 hours and has been sitting in this spot maybe 2 hours.

Tech gets busy we talk a bit, then I go in the house. Maybe 45 minutes later, tech knocks on the door, asks if I can come out and see if I'm pleased. He did bring the 3-point hitch.

We don't even get back to the tractor and I can still see globs of grease that have not been touched. So I get busy and start cleaning. Then junior runs out of shop towels so I have to get mine. We spend another 30 minutes cleaning massive amounts of grease. At one point I'm cleaning around the backhoe zerk on the main L-R pivot pin and the zerk unscrews in my hand.

Finally, tech says he has another appointment and needs to go. Well, we've cleaned the biggest problems so I figure I can load it up on the trailer one day this week and take it to the car wash. Strike 2.5.

So I move the BX to a different spot on the driveway. Come back in about 2 hours and another spot beneath the FEL manifold. Hmmm. I get down and look at there is fluid/dirt grime on all of the hydraulic lines feeding the manifold. Looks like quite a bit of grime to have accumulated in the 2.4 hours before I got it and the .7 hour I added.

So I clean it all very well, dry it off. Take the BX and level a couple of small dirt piles around our firepit that I shoveled and wheel barrowed last fall. Took maybe 7 minutes.

Parked BX back on new spot on driveway.

Got up this morning, went out and another spot beneath FEL manifold. Took picture and emailed to dealer. Strike 3.

At this point, I'm not happy at all. Have an expensive piece of equipment I wanted to rely on for a bunch of work over a bunch of years. I opted for Kubota over JD for reputation, SSQA on FEL and backhoe control familiarity. Opted for dealer since they are the only Kubota dealer around and 4.8 out of 5 rating online, vs. JD dealer having a 3.5/5 rating, plus I've been in their dealership and been totally ignored for 20 minutes.

But I'm NOT impressed at all with Kubota nor the dealer now. I'm beginning to suspect that I was sold a used tractor at a new price. Dealership obviously has issues with delivery at least.

I did a lot of research and felt, at the time, I was making a good decision in going with Kubota and this dealer. Sadly, it seems that both have been the wrong decision.

I am reserving posting the dealership name until I find out what their resolution will be. But I have little confidence in their product at this point. We will see what their service is like on Monday.

 

[MilkyWay]

....I did a lot of research and felt, at the time, I was making a good decision in going with Kubota and this dealer....

WOW! V E R Y disappointing recount of your experience! Welcome to the forum, even though this is not your first post. I don't know if a call to a regional sales and/or service rep would do any good or not. I would like to think somebody out there on OTT might take an interest and send your post along to someone they know with high integrity and get that rep to call you, after they contact your dealer to see what they say first! I feel like your local dealer has zero pride in his business, and if he gives many customers the type of dis-service that he has given you so far, you will need to find another dealer, as they won't be in business much longer. Again, WOW!

 

[losttrail61]

WOW! V E R Y disappointing recount of your experience! Welcome to the forum, even though this is not your first post. I don't know if a call to a regional sales and/or service rep would do any good or not. I would like to think somebody out there on OTT might take an interest and send your post along to someone they know with high integrity and get that rep to call you, after they contact your dealer to see what they say first! I feel like your local dealer has zero pride in his business, and if he gives many customers the type of dis-service that he has given you so far, you will need to find another dealer, as they won't be in business much longer. Again, WOW!

This dealer is actually taking over another Kubota dealer that is closer but was apparently MUCH worse. My dealer has a 4.8 out of 5 rating online. Seemed like a good indicator all interactions were friendly, professional, timely. Response to my issues has been timely, but not quality, in my opinion. Dealer is 45+ away just driving, not towing anything.

Next nearest Kubota dealer, either north or south, will be even further away.

Big Green & Yellow dealers around here have even lower online ratings. I've been to both G&Y dealers near me and apparently I'm invisible since I could walk around, look at 1025R, climb on it for 20+ minutes and not one employee cared enough to ask if I needed help. Even when I walked up and said I was interested in buying one, I was told: "Everyone's busy, we''ll get with you in a bit."

I did receive email notice that my salesman has read the email I sent this morning.

We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Thanks for the input. Happy Easter, He is risen.

Signing off as the kids and grandkids will be here shortly. It's not about the bunny. It's about the lamb.

 

[Hodgy]

.

Thats not a good story.

They call them Stealerships for a reason.


.

 

[sheepfarmer]

Well to play devil's advocate, with regard to the grease, some of us grease the zirks until some is clearly oozing out from the joint and then leave it there. Then when it is time to grease it again, clean the worst of the glob off, clean the zirk, and regrease. With loaders needing grease every 10 hours, a contractor would have to do their tractor every day. No point in being too fastidious about it. At least your tractor was greased.

The leak in your hydraulics is another matter. See if you can clean the area up where it appears to be coming from, and identify whether it is a leaking fitting or not. It may just need to be tightened. Be careful not to put your hands any where near a leak when the hose is under pressure.

 

[motionclone]

Sounds like the dealership is having the same issues all companies across the nation are having. Crappy and incompetent employees in low level positions.


Took my mothers fancy JD mower to a large chain JD dealer here in Maine to have its first service done. It came back with the oil filler cap missing and no oil in engine. I started to move it, saw oil on side of engine so i shut it off and called them. Hopefully damage wasnt done but pure incompetence.

 

[shiraz627]

At least you know they greased it! Mine was pretty clean but it was only at the dealer for a couple of days. Now it's a real pig pen with grease. I wouldn't expect a tractor to be detailed.

 

[SidecarFlip]

Well to play devil's advocate, with regard to the grease, some of us grease the zirks until some is clearly oozing out from the joint and then leave it there. Then when it is time to grease it again, clean the worst of the glob off, clean the zirk, and regrease. With loaders needing grease every 10 hours, a contractor would have to do their tractor every day. No point in being too fastidious about it. At least your tractor was greased.

The leak in your hydraulics is another matter. See if you can clean the area up where it appears to be coming from, and identify whether it is a leaking fitting or not. It may just need to be tightened. Be careful not to put your hands any where near a leak when the hose is under pressure.

Pretty much covers it. Sounds to me like you have a few weeping fittings. Easy fix with an open end wrench.

After all it's a tractor, not a Bugatti.

Like Sheepfarmer said, oozing grease is way better than no grease at all. My tractors all have oozing fittings and when it gets to heavy, I wipe it off. Just bought a used M9 last week and the first thing I looked at was if it was greased and how much residual grease was showing, there was plenty and it was dirty too. Tells me the previous owner greased it. Good thing in my view.

Same applies to loose alemite fittings. No dealer is going to check every fitting. You will almost always have some loose ones. Last new tractor I took delivery of, I has a few missing entirely. Quick trip to my box of fittings, socket wrench and all was good again. I don't get my panties in a twist over stuff like that. Life is too short.

 

[leveraddict]

Disconnect the front end loader quick connect fittings wipe down and reconnect. It may be that simple. Mine never leaked until I removed the FEL the first time. When I reconnected it the tractor wasn't quite close enough to the FFL but I got it on...barely. It was slightly canted. When I went to use the tractor I noticed it leaking. A quick disconnect and reconnect stopped that leak!

 

[lugbolt]

From a tech's standpoint.....

It is impossible to please 100% of the people 100% of the time, no matter how hard you try, and trying harder will (guaranteed!) make you go crazy; and I'm 3/4 the way there now after 30 some odd years of it.

....and yes I've had it happen to me, though I'm not sure it was quite as "bad" as what you're describing. Why? Because 99.9% of the time, if there ain't any grease oozing out of the joint, we get blamed for NOT greasing it, so we have to make sure to, well, somehow let the owner know that we did in fact grease it. If we clean it all off, we are blamed for NOT doing it, if we don't clean it off, we still get to be the "bad guy". We don't win in either situation. This actually just recently happened to me, lost a good customer over greasing. I got blamed for not greasing it, but last year he griped because we "over" greased it so I did my best to clean the excess off. Our shop has cameras everywhere and we do have video proof of me doing the complete job as requested, but in his mind, "the video was edited". B.S.

Loose fitting? It happens. Pull the coupler off and the fitting is loose.

tech probably had a pneumatic grease gun. Why? Because if you do 4-5 service jobs a day on backhoes, TLB's, or excavators, you will physically wear yourself out using a lever or pistol grip manual gun. Pneumatic or cordless are the only two ways to go but they move a lot of grease quickly, so much that if the joint is already full of grease, it'll make a mess...and sometimes that mess doesn't get cleaned up as well as a consumer "thinks" it should. That and most times there is a flat rate to work under, so if a service job on a, say, KX080-4 pays 2.3 hours (for example purposes only), you better be able to do it in that or less...or face losing money. The other option is to charge the customer a little more and I think everyone knows that if possible, that's not a very good option! Obviously none of us like to lose money. From a consumers standpoint, most of the time we don't care about the dealer losing money. It's like we're making millions so losing $20 makes no difference. But trust me...it does.

Sorry for your situation, but I fully understand both sides.

On the leaking couplers, there was a bulletin that described it, and warranty will pick up the tab on it usually.

 

[AndyM]

I have had some beefs about my dealer but the delivery event went exceptionally well, especially as I screwed up some paperwork. Sales rep just brought a fix with him and we were done. I very much appreciated that, now even more so given the ops experience.

 

[losttrail61]

At least you know they greased it! Mine was pretty clean but it was only at the dealer for a couple of days. Now it's a real pig pen with grease. I wouldn't expect a tractor to be detailed.

This dealership***8217;s policy is to remove the major globs of grease then wash the tractor before delivery. None of that got done.

When they called on Saturday, their comments after seeing the photos I sent, was that this was totally unacceptable, they had dropped the ball and that they would send someone out to clean and detail it.

Attached are just 3 of the photos I sent them, not even the worst. Plus there were spots of smeared grease on various parts, fender, floor board, hood, mower deck. And not new grease but the factory black stuff.

Dad always taught us to grease until the joint oozed, then clean off the ooze and the zerk. Leaving excess grease attracts dirt, runs the potential of pushing dirt in through a dirty zerk next time. Plus it's not fun getting grease all over yourself, clothes, seat, truck and if you brought it in the house and got it on mom's furniture, well, that wouldn't end well.

 

[dirtydeed]

sorry to hear your issues. They are great machines. You'll just need to get a few minor details sorted and you'll be on your way.

I don't understand why some of the issues (dirt/excess grease/loader valve leak) were not observed during the pre-delivery inspection? Did your dealer not ask you to perform that inspection prior to taking delivery? They usually have a checklist that they go over with you.

 

[leoric]

I know you're excited about your tractor and you want it to be in tip top shape when you get it, but it's a tractor. That is exactly what my backhoe looks like right now and I just power washed it yesterday. Forgetting the 3pt was the dealers fault. The rest seems minor. Of course the dealer sent a young kid out to spot clean your tractor. The veteran service guys are out fixing the tractors that broke under warranty. Also as lugbolt and flip echoed I had loose lines/leaks/etc when I received my machine too. A simple turn of a wrench fixed it up. I understand your frustration but it sounds like the dealer is trying to work with you. They gave you a free thumb. That'll end up solving more frustrations than grease when you're trying to grab that damn stump after digging it! Good luck and congrats on your new tractor. Just hop on it and get it dirty!

 

[losttrail61]

sorry to hear your issues. They are great machines. You'll just need to get a few minor details sorted and you'll be on your way.

I don't understand why some of the issues (dirt/excess grease/loader valve leak) were not observed during the pre-delivery inspection? Did your dealer not ask you to perform that inspection prior to taking delivery? They usually have a checklist that they go over with you.

They delivered to our home, nearly 1.5 hours late from the scheduled time. We are in the midst of having our house resided, so by the time he arrived, I was bombarded with questions/issues from siding crew. Also, we own our own business and had numerous client and contractor calls coming in. My fault for only asking why so much grease from guy who only does deliveries. That was Wednesday, parked tractor and didn’t get to really look at it until Friday. I had blocked out from 9-10am for the tractor delivery, but he didn’t arrive until nearly 10:30am, so the dam had burst and I couldn’t divert any longer. My fault, I should have just refused to accept it.

 

[losttrail61]

I know you're excited about your tractor and you want it to be in tip top shape when you get it, but it's a tractor. That is exactly what my backhoe looks like right now and I just power washed it yesterday. Forgetting the 3pt was the dealers fault. The rest seems minor. Of course the dealer sent a young kid out to spot clean your tractor. The veteran service guys are out fixing the tractors that broke under warranty. Also as lugbolt and flip echoed I had loose lines/leaks/etc when I received my machine too. A simple turn of a wrench fixed it up. I understand your frustration but it sounds like the dealer is trying to work with you. They gave you a free thumb. That'll end up solving more frustrations than grease when you're trying to grab that damn stump after digging it! Good luck and congrats on your new tractor. Just hop on it and get it dirty!

I agree, to a point. It is a tractor, I expect it to get dirty.

But they, owner and salesman, made a point of their policy being to deliver a clean, washed tractor.

You should see the amount of grease that is thrown around the inside of the mower deck and the spindle protective caps. Those are going to get massively gunked up if not cleaned before use.

Bottom backhoe pivot pin can’t even be seen because the whole area is covered in black grease/dirt crust.

I don’t expect perfection, but when they make the point, I do expect it to be right.

I know I will get a call here shortly. I will have some apologizing to do for interrupting salesman’s Easter Sunday with my email, taking out a combination of frustrations.

We will get this figured out and move on.

 

[SidecarFlip]

This dealership***8217;s policy is to remove the major globs of grease then wash the tractor before delivery. None of that got done.

When they called on Saturday, their comments after seeing the photos I sent, was that this was totally unacceptable, they had dropped the ball and that they would send someone out to clean and detail it.

Attached are just 3 of the photos I sent them, not even the worst. Plus there were spots of smeared grease on various parts, fender, floor board, hood, mower deck. And not new grease but the factory black stuff.

Dad always taught us to grease until the joint oozed, then clean off the ooze and the zerk. Leaving excess grease attracts dirt, runs the potential of pushing dirt in through a dirty zerk next time. Plus it's not fun getting grease all over yourself, clothes, seat, truck and if you brought it in the house and got it on mom's furniture, well, that wouldn't end well.

Looks fine to me but then I use my tractors for farming, they ain't toys.

Commenting on your mower deck comment, you ought to see the deck on my '0' turn. I's splattered with grease thrown from the spindles and it always is. I grease them at least every 5 running hours and grease them until it's visible. Grease is a lot cheaper than new spindles. Same with pins on loaders and hoes. You seize one from lack of grease, it's a real bear to remove and replace. I have an air bulk greaser and I use it.

Finally, I see they use a good grade of grease too, looks like synthetic base, not the cheap clay base junk Tractor Supply sells.

IMO, you are being way too anal.

 

[losttrail61]

Looks fine to me but then I use my tractors for farming, they ain't toys.

Commenting on your mower deck comment, you ought to see the deck on my '0' turn. I's splattered with grease thrown from the spindles and it always is. I grease them at least every 5 running hours and grease them until it's visible. Grease is a lot cheaper than new spindles. Same with pins on loaders and hoes. You seize one from lack of grease, it's a real bear to remove and replace. I have an air bulk greaser and I use it.

Finally, I see they use a good grade of grease too, looks like synthetic base, not the cheap clay base junk Tractor Supply sells.

IMO, you are being way too anal.

And I respect your opinion.

Mine is, that if someone makes a commitment but doesn't deliver and admits they did not deliver, it should be made right.

And it is. Had a very nice conversation about an hour ago with salesman. My first comment was: "I need to apologize for my email on Sunday and how unprofessional I was. I am embarrassed and truly sorry. I allowed some unrelated problems to creep into this issue and should have just stepped away, cooled down and waited until this morning to call you directly."

We are good. I have purged a bunch of mental crap, made some adjustments to some non-related issues that clouded my view on this.

My apologies for venting my frustrations here. Just didn't expect a greasy tractor with a hydraulic leak to be delivered.

Now back to your regular scheduled programs.....

 

[SidecarFlip]

"Now back to your regular scheduled programs....." That is a humorous comment there....

Reminded me of when I got the M9 new back in 2004. Paid top buck because it was special order with special options. Had to come from Japan so I waited almost 4 months for it and it gets delivered and almost immediately I pop the seal on a lift cylinder plus one of the saddle tanks has a bad weld and the bung is drizzling diesel fuel on the ground and it won't develop adequate oil pressure so it shuts down all by itself. Call my dealer (not upset just want just want it right fr 50 grand).

Came out and got it the next day, brought a loaner unit along. New front cover on the engine (the oil pump and spool valves for controlling engine oil pressure are in the front cover), new fuel tank on the right side (bad weld on the bung) and a new lift cylinder. had the tractor 3 weeks. at my dealer who by the way also farms.

Never been an issue since then as far as any failure related to faulty components. Tractors, big or little are complex machines assembled by humans (for the most part) so things happen. When I look at a tractor (just bought another used M9), I look for grease oozing from greaseable joints. Tells me the previous owner actually maintained it.

In reality, the cheapest consumable item you'll ever consume on any tractor or implement is grease.

 

[Muzzy]

Get a rag, wipe her down, put her to work, so easy..