nuffield1060
Member
- Location
- Edinburgh
Aye I drove one last summer, as has already been mentioned the cab is far too small for a 'big' tractor with nowhere really to put your lunch, if you're tall like me you're always banging your knees on the bit under the steering wheel turning round to look out the back window at a trailer or implement and as for that stupid headrest/backrest type job that swings half round it'll drive you mad. Put a couple of control boxes on the rail and they seem to be just about in your face compared to a magnum cab. Having said all that it was comfy enough, cab suspension is better than the pumas which the cab has come off though. A mechanic on one of his many visits to the tractor told me that case had designed a new cab for the tractor but run out of time to fit it so it would be coming sometime soon when a facelifted version was released.
As for in field performance the tractor would easily race around the field with a full grain trailer and on the road it was pleasant to drive, however it did struggle to pull implements which should have been no bother for a 300hp tractor, I couldn't quite figure out whether this was down to lack of weight or lack of power due to losses in the cvx 'box. To give you an example, the magnum 310 cvx we also had pulled the same 5 leg subsoiler at approx 7km/h where the optum stuggled to get to 4km/h. This couldn't have been down to lack of traction as the optum had dual wheels on. During the summer we demoed a 6m horsch joker which the optum struggled to get above about 9km/h with which was equally dissaponting. The tractor suffered catastrophic gearbox failure with only 74 hours on the clock while subsoiling, the dual wheels had to be removed and the tractor taken away on a trailer. Gearbox problems seems to be common with optums and these t7.315s which are basically blue optums
All in all I think it would be a good tractor if it had a better cab and gearbox and case had perhaps spent a bit of money on general build quality. I spent a lot of the summer on a second optum pulling a cultipress which it handled well. I must say I have no particular agenda against case tractors, however a word of warning to anyone thinking of buying one, build quality is not up to much at all. Where I was working we had a number of brand new case tractors, on one puma the tractor's brain lost all but one of the clutches - 12 hours on the clock, a magnum lost the middle 6 gears of the gearbox because of clutch pack failure - 200 ish hours on the clock and my optum couldn't decide if it was in park, neutral or drive and made some nice noises that sounded like it had selected all of the above - 74 hours on the clock. Make of that what you will...
