3F/-16C, no block heater... Bam. Fires right up.
The Zetor was not exciting to start either, as I had the block heater plugged in for three hours while I cleared snow with the Ford... What was exciting was the frozen clutch, and sticky reverser... The thing has a multi-plate concentric dry clutch, and I think not the main, but the intermediate throwout bearing between the plates was gummy and did not want to separate, or maybe the ceramic plates were frozen together? In any case, it would only half clutch, and the oil in the fully-synchronized reverser was so thick that it wanted to be spinning both directions at once... This may have also been contributing to the clutch problem... In any case it took adjusting the tension tighter on the clutch cable, pumping and dumping the pedal a bunch, and nearly an hour of warm up before it would shift... It’s times like this that I sort of wish we’d spent the (not inconsiderable) extra money for a Proxima 90, as the Proxima not only uses the Zetor engine, but also an in-house transmission with a wet clutch and powershift. The Major 80 uses a Cararro transaxle made in Italy... Its a “fine” unit, and New Holland uses the same trans on some of it’s machines, but the Zetor trans is renowned to be absolutely bulletproof, and the Italian unit obviously has some issues with extreme cold :p