I have a Cat 941 with a set of very very worn out track,s. i have a chance to get a very nice used of chains off nitelights cat 951C, but before i drive 2 states over to get them i should better make sure they will work on my 941? thanks Bobby Miller
No. tctractors
The 941 80H uses 6.75" track pitch. The 951C uses 6.91" track pitch. The 951B uses 6.75" track pitch and can be converted to 6.91". There is no 6.91" pitch conversion for the 941.
thanks for the info guys, Well i hope i don't sound to stupid but can you school me on track pitch?
Pitch is the centre to centre distance between one track pin and the next.
thanks for the schooling Nige. I was kind of thinking that's what it stood for but was not sure. Well the track on mine must be past worn out or they are the wrong ones becasue i measured a pitch of 7-1/8 but i could be off a few trying to measure them pin to pin
Pull the track tight and then measure the length of, say, 10 links and divide the result by 10 to get a more accurate figure.
On a machine that small you might be pushed trying to measure across 10 links, 3-5 might be more feasible. Keep moving the machine and measuring to get a set of results. If the tracks on your machine are simply sealed as opposed to sealed and lubricated then I suspect any measurement over and above the 6.75" will be pitch extension caused by wear in the pins & bushes. Are your existing tracks Cat or aftermarket..? If they are Cat see if you can read a Part Number cast into one of the links just under the shoe. That would enable us to identify what pitch they are, there is a possibility that someone may have installed 6.91" pitch tracks in the past without realising they were the wrong ones for the machine.
Is easiest to measure from the leading edge of one pin to the fourth pin leading edged with two carpenter squares, a framer and a finish adjustable to keep the measure square not guessed. Place the framer inside corner at the pin to start, move the adjustable down the long side to the third or fourth pin same edge to get a measure to divide by the number of pins to get a average pitch. My Allis is 7.0 pitch and has a measure over 29 inches across four so is well beyond worn slick.
I decided to post this here rather than mess up Nitelite's thread too much by going off topic about your machine. Looking at the way the shoes are mounted to the chains it appears to me that someone has butchered the shoes to get them on. Both the leading and trailing edges of the shoes have been chopped off, I assume maybe because of binding of some type, so what you're left with is something that looks pretty nasty. Also as Nitelite pointed out someone at some time has added a bar on to one of the three grousers on each shoe to turn the shoes from loader to dozer type. Maybe the fact that your chain pitch (from the measurements you quoted) is wrong for the machine is the reason this was done - someone got a set of tracks from somewhere and has made them fit the 941.
Hey Nige thanks for all the great info and to tell the truth i was the one that welded the grouser bar on. After a 300 dollar recover bill to get my track loader unstuck, i think i wouldn't of gotten stuck if the pads were not worn out.lol I decided to put the bar on. well i have never gotten stuck again. Also i take it that was not the right way to do it? i was going to buy new pads and bolts but decided they would be a waist of time and money on my used tracks. well those tracks were on it when i bought it. Also why do the pads have the big hole in the middle, to me it looks like i am missing a lot of surface area like that? Just so i understand it looks like nitelite tracks will not work on mine? thanks Bobby
Not a criticism at all. You did what you had to do to get traction on your machine. Your shoes are probably pretty well gone by now, so you can't screw them up any more. The hole in the centre of the shoe is so that soft materials cannot get packed into the links, they are pushed out of the hole by the sprocket teeth. Compare the illustration below with what your shoes look like, especially in area of the red circle - ignore the fact that it is double grouser shoe rather than triple, it's the principle I'm talking about. As you can see all your shoes appear to be missing the "nose" and the "tail". Were those shoes cut, were they removed from another type of machine entirely, or have they worn like that..? I have no idea from your photos. The other possibility is that you have so much internal wear in your pins/bushes that the ends of the track shoes would never overlap one another. The measurement #4 is the track pitch BTW. According to what I can see and what others have posted your 941 80H tracks are 6.75" pitch, Nitelite's 951C tracks are 6.91" pitch, so the answer is no they will not fit easily - unless someone somewhere sells a sprocket ring for a 941 that is designed for 6.91" pitch track chains. You need to replace your sprockets anyway, so if you can find a replacement 941 sprocket designed for 6.91" pitch links then Nitelite's old tracks would fit your machine.