I have an excavator that i got recently for my own personal use on my property. Not running a business with it. The hydraulic fluid looks like crap, and an oil analysis shows a decent amount of metal the oil analysis place recommended changing it. (i was going to change it anyway) because it's for personal use, and it takes about 110 gallons, i'm trying to find a somewhat low-priced fluid, that isn't going to fry my hydraulics system. I'm looking for a 46-weight fluid. I see Sinopec has a pretty low-priced fluid that's AW46. http://buysinopec.com/products/aw-hydraulic-iso-46-55-gallon-drum?variant=539976961 ' The also have a low-priced HVI46 fluid: http://buysinopec.com/products/cold-temperature-hydraulic-iso-46-55-gallon-drum?variant=966251732 I'm looking for anyone with particularly good or bad experiences running this fluid. Or, any other recommendations for hydraulic fluid that isn't going to break the bank. (I obviously don't want to break the machine either.....) Mike
Oh, and BTW, the machine is a late 80's Akerman H10BLC with about 9300 hrs
Cheap oil is cheap for a reason .......... As posted by myself on another thread only a couple of days ago ...... "Personally I can't get my head round the fact that anyone would contemplate buying a machine costing 10's (or even 100's) of thousands of dollars and then compromise it by nickel and diming on lubricants and filters. Doesn't make sense to me." ........ Make of that what you will.
My $.02: Pony up for good oil if you can, change the filters after maybe a hundred hours on the first go and have some reputable dealer or service run a filter caddy on the oil at that time. Take samples before and after the offline filter cart has cleaned the fluid down to 2 or 3 microns absolute. Take samples every time you change engine oil, change the hydraulic filters when the bypass alarm comes on at working temp and run the filter cart if the sample report says to. The lab will give you recommendations. Good oil kept clean and water free will last a long, long time. If you're still seeing metal after the first filter changeout, you will really need to figure out where that's coming from, yellow metal is bad, iron or steel contamination means an early death if not corrected quickly, but I'm sure you know that. Everybody has their own system.......
Here are some facts about sinopec oil.. Who: Sinopec Lubricants, the world's 4th largest lubricant company. How: Sinopec is the 2nd largest oil refiner in the world. Where: Sinopec is a publicly traded company on the New York, London, Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchange. Sinopec ranked in the top 10 global companies at $487 billion last year. Annual ranking of the world's largest cooperations. Companies are ranked by annual revenue: http://www.rankingthebrands.com/The-Brand-Rankings.aspx?rankingID=50&year=821 Sinopec partners with Shell, first joint lube park http://www.shell.com/global/product...013/shell-sinopec-total-shared-lube-park.html
Do you work for Sinopec? That doesn't tell me anything useful about the quality of that particular product. It just tells me they're good at refining large quantities of oil, and making a lot of money. To everybody else, I'm leery of using such a low-priced product, which is why i was asking opinions. I'm trying hard not to spend 20% of what i paid for the machine (plus filters) on a fluid change. I figure anything is going to be better than the black-ish fluid that's in there now Then again, assuming they meet certain industry-standard test specifications, it can't be too bad, or it wouldn't pass these tests. I did notice that these particular ones don't meet very many specifications. Any oil recommendations for my situation? What's the lowest-priced "good" oil, and how do you define "good"?