Chinese Tractor Owners Association

Use bonded washers – the steel washers with the rubber bonded in the holes.  They worked for me until i finally got rid of the POS valve and bought a better one from Ronald at Ranch Hand Supply.  Not cheap, but well worth it – the loader now operates the way it should and has float, too.

What Tinbender says is, sadly, too true.  The OEM Chinese control valve assembly on the ZL-30 loaders have no provision for power beyond or float or regenerative cycling, either.  They are as basic as they can be, and pretty sloppily made at that.  Mine drove me crazy with its slow movement, lack of finesse and inability to make "compound" moves.  The only solution was to replace it.

I replaced mine with, as noted previously, an after-market valve assembly from RanchHand Supply.  I'm sure Tommy at Affordable Tractor Sales also sells a similar (or identical) unit.  As noted, at around $600 it was not cheap, bu tit made all the difference in the world to the way the loader operates.  It was a snap to install and came with the necessary hoses and/or fittings to mate right up to my loader's hard piping.  Now my loader has float on the arms, regenerative cycling on the dump and provision for power beyond when I'm ready to make a grapple and need a power source for it.

My ZL-30 loader has some other issues, like bad geometry on the bucket cylinders that I need to correct when I replace the cylinders I bent.  They just didn't adjust the geometry when they made the switch to a QA bucket, so the cylinder rods get flexed over the end of the arms when at full uncurl (dump).  It will take some major cutting and welding, but I can correct that and get a bit more bucket curl while I'm at it.  At that point it will be just fine.

You might want to take a look at your loader's bucket cylinder rods when they're at full uncurl to see if they're doing the same as mine.  That issue sets them up for bending later, I found out the hard way.  You can do a simple correction by just welding a hard stop on the bucket mount to prevent the over-travel that flexes them.