Skid steers take the abuse. Then they quit.
No other machine on a site works this hard in this little room. Pallet forks at eight, a breaker at ten, a bucket of wet fill by noon, all of it inside a footprint the size of a parking space. When one goes down it takes three trades with it. We repair them where they sit.
- Open 24 hours, seven days
- No hourly minimum
- Tracked and wheeled
- Rental fleets welcome
Small machine, hard life, short patience
A skid steer does not get the easy work. It gets the corner the loader cannot reach, the pad nobody graded, the demo pile, the muddy approach after three days of rain. It turns by dragging one side against the other, which is efficient and brutal in equal measure. Everything about how these machines fail traces back to that: loaded pins, loaded bushings, loaded drive motors, and a hydraulic system asked to run an attachment it was borrowed for.
The result is that skid steer faults show up as slop and slowness long before they show up as a breakdown. A quick-attach that needs a boot to seat. A lift arm that drifts down while the operator walks away. A machine that pulls left on flat ground. Operators learn to work around all three, and then the machine strands somebody on a Friday afternoon with a full bucket in the air.
We would rather catch it at the slop stage. Most of what goes wrong on these machines is repairable in a yard or on a pad with the machine cold: couplers, seals, hoses, bushings, motors, sensors, wiring chewed by rodents over a wet winter. Call it in when it starts feeling wrong and the fix is a morning. Call it in when it dies and the fix is still a morning, just a worse one for your schedule.
Brands in the fieldBobcat, Cat, Case, John Deere, Kubota, New Holland, Takeuchi and the compact track loaders that share their running gear.
What the job runsYou get the figure before we load the truck, and it covers the trip and the wrench time together. A quick coupler rebuild is billed as a quick coupler rebuild, not as a half day.
How far we travelAnywhere in Napa and Solano, the Highway 12 and I-80 runs, plus Contra Costa, Alameda and Sonoma when the job justifies the drive. See where we run.
Hydraulics, couplers and the attachment that will not lock
Auxiliary hydraulics are what turned this machine into a whole fleet, and they are where most calls start. The flat face couplers on the arms are the weak point. They get dropped in dirt, they get connected under residual pressure, and the O-rings inside them go flat. What the operator reports is that the attachment runs slow, runs one direction only, or heats the oil until the machine goes into limp.
The quick-attach plate itself is the other half of the story. Those two wedges have to pull the attachment tight against the plate. When the linkage wears, the levers move but the wedges do not seat fully, and the bucket rattles on the plate. That rattle wears the mounting ears fast, and an attachment that can rattle can also come off. It is one of the few faults on a skid steer that is genuinely dangerous rather than merely expensive.
We test auxiliary flow and pressure at the couplers rather than guessing from the symptom, check the case drain if the attachment is a motor type, and pull the coupler apart when the numbers say the restriction is there. On the plate side, worn wedges, stretched linkage and cracked welds all get repaired on site. A cracked plate does not need a shop. It needs somebody with a welder standing in front of it.
A machine that pulls to one side has been telling you something for weeks. It is cheaper to listen than to replace what it wore out while you ignored it.
How we approach these machines
What actually breaks on these
None of these arrive alone. A weeping chaincase seal becomes a chain. A slow attachment run long enough becomes hot oil, and hot oil finds every seal in the machine that was already marginal.
Auxiliary hydraulic faults
Slow or one-way attachment function, hot oil, couplers that will not connect. Flow and pressure tested at the arm, not assumed from the symptom.
Lift and tilt cylinders
Drifting arms, weeping rods, bent rods from a load that shifted. Reseal on site where the cylinder can come off cleanly.
Drive motors and chaincase
One side weaker than the other, whining under load, oil escaping past an axle seal. The most common reason a machine gets parked for good.
Track and undercarriage work
Thrown tracks, worn sprockets, seized idlers and rollers on compact track loaders that live on abrasive ground.
Electrical and no-start
Seat and bar interlocks, chewed harnesses, corroded grounds, dead batteries and controllers that will not wake up.
Service intervals
Oil, filters, hydraulic oil, final drive fluid and a real greasing, done at your yard on a schedule you choose.
Tracked or wheeled changes the whole conversation
A wheeled skid steer is simple and cheap to keep alive. Tires wear, you replace tires. The chaincase and drive motors carry everything, and the failure list is short. What kills wheeled machines is hours in mud with worn tread, because the operator compensates by spinning, and spinning loads the chaincase in exactly the way it hates.
A compact track loader trades that simplicity for flotation. It goes places a wheeled machine cannot, and the price is an undercarriage with sprockets, idlers, rollers and rubber that all wear together. Tension matters more than owners expect. A track run loose throws itself; a track run tight eats bearings and shortens the rubber by a season. We set it by measurement and tell you what the rest of the undercarriage has left in it, because replacing rubber on a worn sprocket buys you half the life you paid for.
The one thing both share is that a rental or auction machine arrives with somebody else’s neglect already built in. We check the obvious deferred items on arrival: hydraulic oil condition, final drive fluid, the state of the couplers, whether the greasing was ever done. Knowing that on day one is worth more than finding out in week three.
What operators ask about skid steer work
If it is down right now, skip the reading and call. The phone reaches a mechanic at any hour.
My attachment runs slow on one machine but fine on another. What is that?
Nine times out of ten it is the couplers rather than the attachment. Flat face couplers hold pressure, and if you try to connect one that is still pressurized the poppet inside does not open fully. The attachment then gets a fraction of the flow it needs. We test flow and pressure right at the arm to separate a coupler restriction from a genuinely weak pump, which matters because those two repairs are nowhere near the same size of job.
The lift arms sink on their own overnight. Is that a cylinder or the valve?
Both fail that way, so we test rather than guess. If the arms hold with the attachment removed but sink with a loaded bucket, the seals in the lift cylinders are usually passing. If the rate of drop stays the same regardless of load, the control valve spool or its check is the likelier cause. Either repair can happen on site. Rebuilding the wrong one is how owners end up paying twice.
Can you work on a machine that tipped over?
Yes, and the priority is what moved inside it. Oil finds its way into the airbox, the exhaust and sometimes the cylinders, so starting it before it has been checked can do more damage than the tip did. We drain and refill what needs it, pull and inspect the air filter, look for bent lift arm geometry and cracked mounts, and only then crank it. Rushing that step is how a recoverable machine becomes an engine job.
We rent these out. Can you look one over between customers?
That is one of the better uses of a mobile mechanic. A between-rental check covers the couplers, the quick-attach wedges and linkage, hydraulic and final drive oil condition, track tension or tire wear, the interlocks, and any damage that came back with the machine. It takes far less time than a repair and it means the next customer does not discover the problem on your behalf.
How long does a drive motor or chaincase repair take on site?
A day for most machines, assuming the part is in hand and the machine can be blocked safely where it sits. The work itself is straightforward. What decides the timeline is access and ground: a machine on a firm pad with room around it goes quickly, and one wedged against a fence on soft fill does not. We tell you which one you have before we start.
What do you charge to come out?
You hear one figure before the truck leaves, and it covers the drive and the work as a single number. There is no hourly minimum on top of it, so a coupler rebuild that takes twenty minutes is billed for what it was. Patrick built the business this way after years of watching customers get told one price on the phone and handed a different one on paper.
Skid steer down? Call it in.
Tell us the make, roughly what hours it has on it, and what it was lifting or running when the trouble started. That is usually enough for us to know what comes off the truck. You get a price and an arrival window on that same call.
HoursMonday to Sunday, 24 hours
Based inAmerican Canyon, CA
Related workField equipment service · Undercarriage · Recent jobs