Farmers jailbreaking John Deere tractors to repair them - video

[Frank S]

This in now only limited to agg. but the mining and construction industry as well. And not just the green goblins but Yellow red orange Blue and every other color of machine manufactures. A few years ago I was doing some welding repairs on a friend's excavator when he asked me to take a look at a fuel leak it had. I told him what parts we needed Cat sold him the parts then after installing them the machine refused run he and I messed with it and messed with it He knew that I used to rebuild the older versions very part we had just replaced. I called a guy in the service depart to find out what I may had done wrong. The first words out of his mouth were you have to bring the machine in so it can be reprogramed to accept the new fuel system parts.
Things are no longer plug an play for just about everything.
I asked him if I could connect my laptop to it and get a disk and do the programing myself. OH sure you can all you need to do is buy the interface module and cables and a $10,000.00 user license then your laptop can be used to do MINOR programing but the machine still wont function properly until it is interconnected with Caterpillar's data system. But you didn't hear this from me he said if you just need to get it started to track it onto a trailer do this and this and this that will let the machine start and have enough power to track itself on the trailer this is what our field tech have to do to bring machines in for repairs.
we got it running but in my opinion every computer in every construction machine that controls the engine and running functions should be wrapped in thermite and torched