john deere 13.5 l engine

Have a 13.5 L engine here on a 9330. It's Tier 3, so it has a lot of EGR on it, which makes the oil dirty. EGR is controlled by a valve that can stop working from all the soot and is pricey to fix. Also this engine seems to have injectors go bad more often than other engines. Over a year ago we had one cylinder misfiring from that. Dealer had to replace all the injectors and that was a bit pricey. $10k when all was said and done. They told me this is a common thing on these engines and no one knows why. Although I suspect it's from the EGR soot.

Ekotuning sells a program for the ECU that forces the EGR valve to stay shut and tunes the turbo parameters, effectively deleting the EGR. I ran mine with a 50 hp boost for a while (9330 tractor), but for what we were pulling it just caused more fuel to be burned, so I set it back to stock hp. After the dealer fixed my injectors I think they put the ECU back to factory and so all last year we ran without the tune installed. This spring I will reinstall the tune.

The 9330 has been a good machine for us, although it's not nearly as comfortable as our 9220. It's quite a bit louder than the old 12.5 L engine, and has always had a very annoying turbo whistle. However it has great torque at 1600-1800 rpm.

Yes, thats good advice on the water pump, I am having my water pump and delete done at the end of the month. My mechanic said alot of engines sitting over winter can leak antifreeze into the oil case and than on start up you get a bent rod among other damage. He said dont wory about delete damaging engine and in fact delete could add alot of life to the engine.

The same guy did my kenworth semi which has a cummins isx. This is year 3 of delete and oil is looking more clearer like canola oil. He also boosted the hp to 575 on that motor.

Last year i had my water pump changed on my john deere combine and got it changed just in time. The pump was just starting to leak but the drain hole was plugged from rust and dust so if it was not done than you would never know how bad it was until it was too late.

Pretty sure it was about 3000 hours when it started having injector problems.  We change the engine oil filter every year with Deere filters, and we use Plus 50II 15W40 engine oil.  Hours are never that high.  Maybe 250-300 hours per year.  The recommended oil change interval is 600 hours or annually.

Good reminder on the water pump. I am pretty sure the design of the pump is improved over the original 12.5l engine's pump. I don't think it will drop bearings into the gear train anymore.

My tune was from Ekotuning.

Ekotuning delete on the 13.5L is about $2k (EDIT: a bit more than $3k) if I recall correctly. No need to physically remove anything because if the valve stays shut there's no EGR happening.

It's interesting how versatile the 13.5L engine is. Mine is only about 375 hp.  So except for issues of cooling and maybe axle size and driveline components, I could probably turn it up to 510. I think I ended up with three programs. No boost, 50 hp boost, and 100 hp boost.  I've never tried the 100 hp boost.  That would take my 9330 to around 475 hp.

Either the Ekotuning dealer comes out and puts it on your tractor with his own programmer or he can sell you a programmer to do it yourself. I chose to buy the programmer so I could switch between the boost profiles, and of course to re-do the tune when the dealership wipes it. Seems like John Deere has dealers reflash the firmware for all kinds of engine problems. Having the programmer to do it myself makes that not so much of an issue.

I would worry a bit about physically removing the EGR components from the engine. If a dealer ever re-flashes the ECU, I am sure it would cause a lot of problems when all the extra hardware is actually missing.

The tuning process itself involves using a laptop to load the firmware into the programmer device, and then using that programming device to program the tractor ECU through the diagnostic port. If you're not comfortable with that process, and if your dealer is nearby, I would just get him to do the flash. He can always come out and flash it again in the future for a small fee.

I didn't notice a real change in the engine's sound or even performance. I haven't kept track of fuel closely enough to tell if I'm saving anything.  I suspect some savings, yes.  EGR typically trades a little extra fuel for less NOx.  I wasn't the guy doing the tillage so I don't know if the torque curve was affected or not.   The 50 hp boost did noticeably burn more fuel.  Since we weren't wanting going any faster or had wider equipment to increase our efficiency, we walked that back. We'll save the boost for some time when we want to pull a high speed disc or something.

The business name where i am getting the software is called Jerry's Diesel Performance. They are from Fort St John B.C. I am not getting a power boost on the software. The mechanic cuts out the particulate filter and plugs all unused ends. He told me the tractor will appear stock if i decided to sell it.
I wish the engineers thought this out more and cared about long term use. the cost for software and labour is 4000. I was told to expect it to take 3 years of oil changes before the oil looks clearer. I wanted to keep this tractor longer term because of the 510 horse power and it has high flow hydraulics and a pto so thought it pays to delete it.