Hi. Have some questions for you fellas. I’m from Canada, and we do snow clearing inside the city. A lot of our manholes are not flush with our city streets and we are frequently hitting them with our graders. It’s impossible to remember where everyone is as we have a fairly decent size city. Our 3 Cat 140m’s have all bent the circles to the point where the shims fall out and circles need replacing at a 30k dollar bill. 2 of the 140’s have bent 2 circles each. They only have around 3-4000 hours. Is this common? Our new 770GP is snapping the circle shims and breaking them right off, but at a much cheaper repair bill, it is still a pain with only 400 hours on it now, it’s done this twice. We used to run Volvo and champion graders and never ever had these problems. Curious if any other city operators have this same situation, and if the 160’s or 870s would stand up better? Love the Cat M series graders, but they aren’t holding up well. Not a fan of the GP’s but they do seem more stout at this moment. But like I said it is still very new with only 400 hrs.
Sounds to me like it’s time the city invested in some tapered rings around the manhole covers. Fortunately for me, I haven’t had to deal with any manhole covers in 7 or 8 years. I’m a little surprised to keep hearing about bent circles, but an operator in the Maritimes made the same complaint in another thread. Must have changed the quality of steel a bit, as I’ve also seen a couple of 140m’s that developed breaks at the front of the frame by the v-plow/ push block mount. The only issues I remember the county having with the old G’s was the arches on the bottom of the circle breaking. I came from a Champion background as well, and there were a few years there that they ended up being a really good machine, and then when the October 2002 emissions came in, they went down fast. I’ve been plesently surprised how good the Deere’s I run have been, but it sounds like we aren’t in as tough of conditions.
One thing I find is if you keep the mb under your control, it tends to bounce the machine over the lip of the manhole frame. If you use float, the mb tends to grab harder and do more damage. Obviously if the manhole is up really high, it's gonna hurt no matter what. I have heard of machines Cats junking circles though.
I agree with fastgraderman it would be in the city’s best interest to fix the manholes therefore eliminating your problem.
I plowed for the province one winter with the grader on by the hour. I did 2 Indian reserves, terrible man holes. I junked one of the government one-way plows hitting one. Hit many with the mb mentioned it several times. They said be careful
We have had 1 bend the circle and the pivot support beam ahead of the circle on our year old 140m just doing maintenance grading, Cat covered it, I believe Cat recognizes that there is a problem with the circle bending on some machines, Cat did a thorough CSI on our machine before covering it under warranty though.
Do these machine have accumulators are are they turned on when this happens?