Point me in the right direction for troubleshooting

[kpauley]

1999 TXT 36V. We use it on the farm to pull a manure spreader across some rough terrain, mild hills, etc. It gets beat up pretty good, has been a workhorse for us. My wife actually drives it more than I do, so she knows how it "feels" and when things are off.

Batteries clearly were dying, so I just replaced them all with Costco batteries, they seem to be working well and there was a definitive improvement after that. All the wiring is clean for the batteries. Only other real service thing that was done at the beginning of this year is I had to replace the forward and reverse switch assembly because it broke. That's just some near history on work done.

What she is telling me is that it seems to go normally driving around on the flats, but it has lost it's oomph going up hills. Sounds like the motor is not pushing it as hard, not enough torque or something.

I have the service manuals through pointers at this site. My question is where to start troubleshooting this. Do the motors go bad and I should start looking at the motor (I saw some tips on checking for continuity that shouldn't be there) or does this sound like an electronics sort of thing?

To be safe, I'm also going through and putting each battery one by one on my 6V charger to make sure they are all individually full charged, but I don't think that will get me very far. Just thought I'd throw this out there to see if there is enough info in what she is telling me to go look one place first and save me some time.