Don't forget to check your blade slides people...........
There was an outfit in Oz that were pushing a high-impact plastic blade slide to replace the steel ones. Did you ever come across them and if so how did they perform..?
Per patent applications, blade slides are receiving a bit of interest... https://www.google.com/patents/US20150129265 disclosure without drawings Deere... https://www.google.com/patents/US20100051301 Diamond impregnated inserts Caterpillar reference patent: https://www.google.com/patents/US3465829 1967
In my experience the operators start to whine pretty loud before they get that bad. Maybe that operator thought the blade was bouncing on the accumulators.
John, of course that's always assuming they are operators and not lever-pullers ........
Problem is, some operators whine from daylight to dusk anyway. Others wouldn't let out a peep until the blade was near falling off "I know you're busy, I don't bother you with piddly stuff" Sucks either way, lol
ointhead I get the same thing at work lantraxco and I actually have to look at my slides when I repair my moldboard as mine almost look like that . noticed it last time I did a repair and gave it a quick test drive
A few years ago we started getting plastic slides from Cat parts but they seemed to die out and we now get bronze ones again. Not sure if they weren't a success or if it was due to popular demand. When plastic circle wear pads and shoe liners came out, there were some complaints as they were a pain to set up. If you have a machine with bronze circle wear parts and you convert it to plastic, you have to go through the process of adding and removing shims and adjusting the jacking bolts as the plastic parts are a different thickness to the bronze ones. If you are replacing bronze with bronze you can keep all the same adjustments.
That's fine so long as the adjustment was correct in the first place. I haven't come across too many like that, basically because most folks who set out to adjust a circle don't have the faintest idea what they're doing and once one or two sets of hands have been in there you basically have to start from scratch again.
Agreed. When I was working for a dealer, if the machine still had the factory setup, I would try and talk the customer out of "adjusting" the circle and to just install a new set of wear parts. The time saved frigging around with shims made it more economical in the long run.
It's funny about different places and operators. Around here the grader hand is usually one of the older guys on the crew and the construction companies doing fine grading don't allow inexperienced hands on the machine that controls the payday. I've seen a couple of green people on coal mine machines but if they didn't get it figured out in a hurry they ended up back on the canopy dozer or in a haul truck.