Has anyone out there got any thing bad to say about john deere 6400 tractors ?

nothing bad ecseped the price deere. very good tractor all round.

Apart from when a little 8mm bolt shears off on the bottom of the gearbox which holds clutch pack together resulting a complete unscheduled oil empty and expensive trip to the doctors.

Gearbox problem as above reported by local dealer as being more common on 64 when it happened to our 68. 5000 hours had a high pressure pipe to replace to the spools. A pig of a job (but not as bad as tightening a coupling feeding the brake pedals on that 68). Watch the fan belt tensioner. Our's has old style puh which eats circlips (pennies but a nuisance). Probably the best value for money, and certainly the most likeable tractor I've ever owned or used. Mind you, my newest too - and it is M reg.

No 100hp tractor is worth what they charge brand new! your better off saving those all important pennies and buying a Case MX 110/120 or a NH TM 115/135. I think JD are good machines but are they really worth an extra 10-25% more than other colours! reliability does not come into it as all tractors are realiable these days. Ok you can get a bad one of any colour, just look at this forum. resale value does not play a big one with me either as everybody is after a bargin so my case 5150 looked after and priced well, will sell before a JD 6900 that is priced over the odds! 'horses for courses' i think. If your a die hard deere fan (deeroids!) then they will buy what ever the price.

Slightly of topic but - IF JD tractors are not the best bet from a financial point of view through a combination of high resale value and good reliability/running costs. Why is it the case that almost all the contract hire firms in the UK will only hire out JD ? I have asked for quotes to hire in case, new holland, jcb, class etc. and every time I get told that the hire fee would be more than the equvilant JD as they need to factor in more depreciation and repairs for other makes ! Thease companys have no motive / colour biased to supply any particular colour they just want to protect their bottom line. As most hire companys probabaly turn over more tractors in a year than the average farmer may do over a lifetime I reckon their experience is worth learning from !! I have no colour bias and our farm has run various makes over the years. Recently they have all been green - not just because we like them (that is no basis for a business decision!) but because they offer the best value for money in OUR situation. I certainly would not buy or hire JD 'whatever the price' I will always take the best deal regardless of colour ! I am in farming to make money, its not a hobby, I will leave emotion and what I want to my car buying decisions !!

Fair comments Clive, I just dont think that they are worth the extra money if I am being totally honest. I dont believe that they are any more reliable than any other colour. There resale value tends to be higher cause they cost more in the first place! So buy buying a cheaper Case IH in the first place and selling it for less than the deere in the long run is no different. they will both be reliable if looked after. I dont think there is a right answer to this but everybody will make there own mind up. Just out of interest on your part a quote for a fendt 926 with full spec was £4,000 cheaper than an 2/3rd's speced JD 8410 this tim elast year! The fendt is 10 times the tractor than whatever a deere or case or NH would be so how do you work that one out then? the case price was less than £50k for a mx270 fully speced whilst the fendt came in at £56k with massive spec (even a front pto) whilst the deere lagged behing at £60k!

Our 6200 did that. Only cost pennies to fix though. Get a thin piece of plastic (the inside of a biro will do) and super glue it to the broken piece of bolt, wind it out, fit new bolt, and Bob's your uncle!

Lee, You prehaps have a good point when it comes to buying a new tractor that you intend to run over many years, however all our tractors our contract hired as all do inxs of 1200hrs a year. To get that kind of work from a machine it needs to be faultlessly reliable and therefore changed regular, all are replaced on a 3-4 year 5000hrs(max)cycle as no matter what colour, this is when they start to get unreliable. My original point was that in this type of application the contract hire companys obiously feel that it is worth paying a higher retail price as in 3-4 years time they will get a good proportion of it back. They also seem to think (rightly or wrongly!) that they are less exposed to repair costs with a JD (their opinion not mine!) My only comment to JD reliablity is based on 3 of the first 6910's that we had on hire (they repalced 3 ford 8340's). Over the 3 years (3500hrs each) that we had them not one had any other than routine service maintence except the odd broken p/up hitch caused by heavy handed students ! Over the 3 years we had the fords the list of repairs is truely endless same goes for a fastrac that we unfortuneatly bought - but don't get me started !! Maybe we just got bad fords and were lucky with th JD's, but thats the point you can't afford a bad one these days. I have no experience of running either Fendt or Case but either of these are makes that I would happily have on the farm - BUT none of the contarct hire firms that we deal with want to quote for any other than JD !! Why ??

Clive, Point taken and I have no idea why the hire firms stick with deere. Perhaps deere are giving them very good fleet purchase deals! I would be very interested to know what sort of money you are paying on contract hire for large tractors such as a 8520 T. Lee

on a personal preferance i drove a 6400 for a yr verge cutting and other contractor tasks . we had very little problems with the 6400 or any other of the 6800s 6810s or the 6910 out of a fleet of 16 deeres we had very little break downs or hassle with them . i would reconmend a john deere of any range and HP to anyone .

Clives point is spot on, the Deere is such a strong name that contract hire companies are never going to risk their margins by hiring out Case or New Holland, no matter how good the product. The bottom line is profit, and JD tractors do not lose anything like the amount of money other tractors do. Yes, you maybe pay more in the beginning, but it still works out better in the long term to buy Deere. Take a trip to Cambridge sales and look at the prices that different tractors fetch. It is no accident that JD fetch higher residuals, they are a better machine. An ex-hire JD6910 will fetch a good price regardless, but an ex hire case MX135 will struggle. The market dictates the patterns, if hire companies will only supply Deere then there is a good reason, whether you agree with it or not. By the way, I run Case and MF tractors and have always bought second hand, so I am not biased in favour of JD. The MF is the most economical tractor in my case (very cheap to buy second hand, cheap parts, reliable engines) but for hire fleet JD are kings and rightly so.

I agree, i'v been running Deere`s for a while now and i have had no trouble.As an example i did some potato carting for a large potatoe farm near where i live.I was using a john deere 6900 at the time,it had 5900 hours on the clock so i was a little aprehensive to do alot of heavy trailer work with it but i decided to give it a go!! The work involved 10 weeks working 7 days per week and 23 hours per day!!! leaving us 1 hour to change shift. By the end of the job i did my calculations and it turned out that it was averaging just £2.85 per hour in diesel!! and as for repaires apart from filter changes it cost nothing!!! any tractor which can do over 1000 hours in 10 weeks with not one problem is a tractor which requires respect.Buy Deere,Deere,Deere

yea, its a bit of a kangaroo flat out on road.

yes if the back end oil cooler pipes rot under the cab its a nightmare to replace them especially if you are in the field. good points bags of power and good lift capacity, a bit poor on turning circle. one more mechanics nightmare is the small bearing in the gearbox which if it goes it's 2 days work just 2 get to it

I disagree with the comment about all contract hire firms being JD. Here in NE Lincs the maincompanies are as follows JD 2 Case IH 3 HN 1. Also all the companies using tractors for high hour work 1500-2000hrs/year use Case MX/CS this boys need reliability and value for money, and are not blinded by colour! Simon H

I had a 6400 with a 640A loader on. It was a very nice machine. Only problems I had was a rubber pipe blowing out under the cab which was a real pig to change. Other than that it was very reliable over the 4 years I had it, but it was very bouncy on the road at 40k. I changed it for a Maxxum because I prefered the left hand shuttle, tighter lock, and the lower price, but it is not as quiet or as reliable as the Deere was. BUT!!! At the end of the day it is all about profit and I will gladly put up with more noise and a few breakdowns if it saves me money and allows me a better car and a nicer holiday. JB

Unless you know what contract hire companys pay for their machines how can you tell they are not just buying the cheapest that is available to them?.. Ask someone in the car fleet trade to see how far prices are screwed in the name of big orders and killing the competion...EG. If you order enough cars of a certain make you get them at half list price.

We have just had the bolts holding thr front weight frame +10weights break whilst going flat out on the road, this caused a fair bit of excitement until the weights broke up enough to pass underneath the tractor.

Youch that sure sounds like it was just loads of fun,eh!

YEP WE HAD A JOHN DEERE 3140 4FWD SHE DID 12000 HRS BEFORE WE TRADED IN FOR A CRAP MF DO SAY WYE!!!!

you are talking about saving money by buying anoyther make like newholland or case . if you look at the facts you would know that the cost of running them per year would be a lot more eg fuel and parts. john deere is one of the most economical tractors to run and are very reliable. just ask anyone who has a 40 series ford/newholland how reliable they are (i dont know any one who hasnt had costly gearbox problems) and how much they spend on parts in a year,you would end up spending more money on another make in the long term.

 

personally if you need to work on it yourself you will hate it the fuel pump placement in the tank is a nightmare  the filter  with a bucket on is  akward to deal with too i could go on sure im a woman and short but i never had a tractor i hated more 

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