the 2 boom pins on my 580c won't take grease....i pulled the zirts and there not clogged....if i heat them with a torch to loosin' them up will i damage them? would like to here any tipps or tricks to get them to take grease... thanks:usa
I did a search on this topic and I gotta say I'm glad I did. I had a couple of stubborn grease fittings. PB BLASTER/degreaser right in the hole, a little heat, I used a little pick in the hole to help clean it out, repeating the pocess, all that crap flowed out enough to accept new grease. I also took the weight off the joint and it worked on a couple as well. Hope this helps.
If you have access to a PortaPower Hydraulic tool - screw the hose from the pump into the zirk hole. I watched mechanics at work do this many times and it never failed to clear the hole. As always wear safety glasses when working with pressurized fluids. Also as Dogboneshd said , remove the weight from the pin.
I needed to do similar methods to what everyone is saying to do to get a few of mine to take grease. How I go about unclogging my grease fittings is after pulling out the grease fitting and making sure its okay, I took the weight off the pin like dogbone says to give it the biggest air gap between the pin and hole the grease comes out of, then I found spraying carburetor cleaner works good to break up harden grease, keep doing it in cycles, take your time and let the carb cleaner set in and do its thing, and then after doing cycles of spraying carb cleaner and picking at it with wire introduce high air pressure power in all different manners..... and of course make sure you have plenty of eye and clothing protection! also make sure nobody is standing around when using air pressure, as well as no open flames and do this is a large open space out side, doors open.... carb cleaner is flammable.... Pretty much like what everyone has been saying with probing the hole with wire and what ever works well does the trick for me... but now I find don't let it go with out grease for too long, I find this is when they clog, so with keeping it greased often you shouldn't get anymore clogged grease fittings
I do think Tinkerer's idea is the most effective. Of coarse I'm one of those people who believe there's no substitute for brute force . I helped a friend recently with a stuck track tensioner on his old excavator. It had the basic single acting cylinders using grease as the fluid. He had a new battery powered grease gun, which put my best pistol grip grease gun to shame, by starting those track cylinders moving after years of being 'stuck'. We had to put a new collet on his gun after it blew apart, but it's output pressure was definitely higher. Phil
pins i just pull em out an drill the dirt out of the grease hole, i`ve never had much luck with tricks
Heat in any situation should always be the last option. Have the grease fittings taken grease in the past or is this machine new to you? If the fittings have never taken grease, whilst you had the machine, I would be inclined to remove the pins and see what is going on. Depending on the set up there may be two holes for the grease to come out plus a grease line around the pin to distribute the grease evenly. Problem being if you are able to 'free the pins', you may well just open one side of the pin and not get the grease evenly distributed as the manufacturer intended.
yes the machine is new to me.....i got 1 side to take grease.....the other side the zrit was broke off and the hole where the zrit goes in was egg shaped....had to take the die grinder and make it round again.....got the old zrit out and put in a new....turn my compressor up to 150psi and tried to get it to take grease....keep hittin' the trigger till i thought the hose was goin' to blow...no dice.....so i pulled the zrit(got shot with grease!!) and shot it full of PBblaster then put fittin' back in and pumped it with grease and left it to soak over night...i'll try again today.....thanks for all the replys...
On the egg shape hole what was that about again? what did you do to fix that if the threads were egg shaped? tap it out bigger? I'm asking because on my steering cylinder the grease fitting must have taken quite a blow, perhaps from driving over a big rock it must have gotten hit hard enough to open up the hole its threaded into. So now the grease fitting sits in this nasty oval hole where grease shoots out the side of the fitting rather than going in. I'm not sure how to go about fixing it.
it was the hole in the pin where the socket goes in to get to the zrit....socket wouldn't go in the hole.....threads where fine....just needs grease!!!...lol... as far as yours i would clean it up really good and stick some JB WELD in it to keep grease in...
oh okay.... I'll try that JB Weld, should be okay once I clean it up before application, thanks...
You might want to check and of corse I may be wrong here but every 580 I have seen only greese from 1 side. the hole on the other side was for the center on the lath to turn the pin on and never went all the way through.
I know what you mean, that can be tricky to see a threaded or not hole thinking the fitting was never installed... ... I'll have to check that on mine making sure someone before me didn't install a grease fitting I do believe where my fitting is its off center tho, thanks for the reminder, I can see me doing that these days...
when i had the zrit out there is a cavity in the pin....this pin is solid in the middle....will i'm goin' to try and knock it out and clean the holes...i'll report back... :usa
reportin' back....i got it cleaned out....man that thing was stuck in there!!!!.....all is good takin' grease just fine.... :usa
I often think if the pin goes a little too dry from lack of grease that a thin layer of metal gets worn off the pin and bushing making for a thin layer of metal blocking the hole to let grease thru, because it seems way too much of a blockage to be harden or what have you... hum?
mine was full of dirt and old grease....was as hard as concrete...had to drill though it with a drill bit then drug it out with an ice pick...