I picked up a pretty nice D3B dozer with backhoe attachment. Rund and drives good however, I have not been able to determine the year. Figured someone on here would nail it down quick. Serial # 45v54937. Pin# 27y04135. Model # D3B Z. Any help much appreciated.
Post some pics. We don't see many D3's with a hoe. It must be really light on the front end. I'm not sure where my serial number booklet is but I'd guess mid to late 80's maybe near the end of production. Someone will be able to tell the year and probably the exact date as well as what it came with from the factory.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER! You have an IMMEDIATE REPAIR before you put the backhoe to use. You see the grease fitting for the top swing post? The black lines indicate a crack in the plate and it's headed straight for the edge of the weld around the swing post bushing. If you pull hard with the hoe you will rip the bushing and 1" plate right off and also bend the bottom 1 1/2" plate. Ask me how I know! The hoe is powerful enough to drag the machine around. It is a very poor design to put a 1/8" npt grease fitting in the narrowest section of the 1" plate. 1/8" npt is almost 3/8" dia. which is a 3rd of the thickness of the plate. The crack started in the middle of the npt threaded hole. Thankfully I'm a welder and repaired it myself. I had to buy a welder but I figure it would have cost 4 or $5000 or more to have someone come out to fix it. It's an easy repair the way it is now. Major repair if it rips off, major! Grind everything out and fill the grease hole completely with weld and grind a good groove all the way along the crack and about 1/2" past on the bushing weld. I drilled and tapped for the smallest size grease fitting at kind of an extreme angle towards the inner hole where the grease comes out. It's at least an inch over from the original hole where there's a lot more meat around it. The same failure also occurred on one of my stabilizers but I take some responsibility as I was on frozen ground and the machine slid and the stabilizer slammed into a frozen lump. I was trying to dig a little drainage trench but it was too frozen. It also looks like your rotary cylinder is leaking. The shaft is likely worn but it can be fixed by spray welding. BTDT too, cost about $340cad. for the metalizing (spray welding) plus a few hours labour for machining and r&r. You need to find a good shop to take it apart and save the inner vanes and seals. One of the members on here like Nige or Cmark sent me the r&r manual for the rotary cylinder. The large o-rings for the end caps and shaft seals are available. The vanes and wipers say contact a dealer which I think mean limited or no availability. I can tell you a much much easier way to remove the rotary cylinder than using a special Cat lifting device and the entire Cat procedure. Your hoe is a 5G2150. This is the later improved backhoe. My serial is 5G0430 I believe and is a 1986. It's hard to tell from the pic. but you might have the optional high flow piston pump to run the backhoe. It doesn't look like it came with the hoe from the factory because there's no grab bars on the top rear and sides of the ROPS canopy. Don't run low on oil. The piston a very expensive variable displacement pump. Think $2000+! All that said you've got a nice looking machine. Just noticed it looks like some welding was done behind the rotary cylinder on the hoe frame. Would be good to check that out. I see it has some counterweights on the dozer blade.
Thanks heymcall. I sure wish I'd noticed the crack before it was catastrophic.
45V54937 is the serial number of the engine. 45V is the engine prefix number and 54937 is the consecutive engine build number. 27Y04135 is the tractor serial number, and it was built in Japan by the Cat/Mitsubishi manufacturing joint venture in 1986. Good call and sharp eyes by Welder Dave. Luckily he owns a 931B with the identical hoe and has hands on experience with it. I'm not sure that D3B's were available with a hoe, and it might have come off a 931B traxcavator.
Shoot, thanks for the heads up. Talk about having an eye for stuff, I hadn't noticed that crack. Iv spotted a few spots where things have been welded. The backhoe does take alot of abuse, seems to really have alot of slack and really flop around alot. I picked her up from a customer of mine, practically begged me to get it out of his yard, I replaced the starter and gave him a thousand bucks. As ugly as she is I love her
The hoes were for both the 931B and D3B. Same with the older rack and pinion swing hoes for the 931 and D3.
You only paid $1000 for it? That's a bona fide steal! A smaller dozer like this that runs and works decent is usually worth putting new undercarriage on if the price reflected that it needed undercarriage. If the price was say up to $10K it could be a good candidate for new undercarriage. If the price was $15K would be debatable. If the price was $25K probably not unless the machine was immaculate. A few weeks ago there was a thread about a 931B with a ripper added that was well worth the higher price.
There were two backhoes (fixed pivot) offered. The 6S4538 arrangement s/n 87U755-up and the 5G2150 arrangement s/n 32W1-up plus two models of side shift backhoes. Interesting in that the early fixed pivot frame was a double plate upper arm swivel, no grease zerk and the later version was a single upper swivel plate with grease zerk
Man, I appreciate all the information. Ya, I'm not sure of it's value but it's certainly a very useful machine
I've got a brochure on the improved D3B/931B backhoes but I don't recall it mentioned anything about the top pivot. Machining the hole even bigger so the grease fitting is recessed is really dumb. There's only about 1/8" thickness around the top and bottom. Doesn't take much for a crack to start there. I also wonder if it was hard to pump grease in, because the pin got dry or something, if the pressure from greasing would contribute to the crack? There's obviously grease getting into the crack from inside out. Yes, there were side shift hoes offered but I think they are extremely rare.
Knew I wasn't going to get by without pictures.....
It looks like it was changed when they went from rack & pinion swing to the rotary cylinder. It seems bizarre to me why the bottom mount is 1 1/2" thick and the top is only a single 1" plate. I doubt it would crack if it was 1 1/2" or even 1 1/4" thick. I would hazard a guess the cracking isn't confined to just the OP's machine and mine.
Now you've got me wondering what it's worth. Iv figured it's a 5 to 10 thousand dollar rig? I'm new to it all,
If the undercarriage is in reasonable condition, it's certainly worth all of $10K.
I'd say closer to $15K if the undercarriage has 30% or more life left in it. The nice thing is it's a Cat, so parts are much better supported than say a JD of the same vintage.
Crazy
Hey Dave, think I'm ready to go after fixing the Rotary cylinder leak, any advice on removal without lifting equipment and cat procedures that you mentioned above would be greatly appreciated. She's juicing pretty good now. Thanks
I'm a little tied up at the moment but will give you a simpler procedure to remove it later in the day. I think it was Cmark, if not Nige, who PM'd me the procedure for taking it apart with a parts diagram and torque specs. etc. You could PM either of them and hopefully they could provide it. It's a 5G2150 (backhoe) rotary swing cylinder. Do you have a good repair shop to do the actual disassembly and re-assembly? It wouldn't be the easiest thing to work on and you want to try to save all the vane seals. I think Cat said to check with a dealer for availibility which means they may or may not be available. The bolts around the top are torqued over 300 ft./lbs. I'll give you more details a little later.
Here's an easier way to remove and install the rotary cylinder to the swing post. Turn the hoe to the right when sitting on the seat (left side of machine when driving straight) and put the bucket flat on the ground. Once the torque arm pins are removed you can take the square torque arm out. Then undo the hoses. There are blocks with 2 bolts on top and 2 bolts on the bottom that hold the rotary cylinder on. The rotary cylinder also has splines that have to be lined up in the right place so it swings the same amount each way. It's a good idea to make some marks on everything that comes apart so you can line it up the same when putting the rotary cylinder back on. Pics. are good too. It's especially important on the blocks with bolts. If I recall the top and bottom blocks might be different and the bolts are different lengths. There are also dowels to locate the blocks. I think the dowels go around the bolt holes. You have to make sure you have everything lined up nice and straight so you don't damage the dowels. More important putting it back together. When it's time to remove the bolts have some 3/4" NC all thread ready. I bought 2 36" lengths and cut them in half. When you remove a bolt thread the all thread into the hole. I think just the 2 top holes would hold but not worth taking a chance they'd bend from the weight of the rotary cylinder. Once you have the 4 lengths of all thread in with nuts loosely up against the blocks, you can gently pry the rotary cylinder off. Loosen the nuts just enough so you can only move the rotary cylinder a little at a time. Once it's back aways you can slide it a few more inches to where you can put a choker sling around it. The all thread will keep it level until it slides all the way off. I used a 1" x 36" double eye lifting sling. Just make sure it's tight. I might have wrapped it under the lugs for the torque arm. Using 2 slings might help to lift it level. The Cat procedure uses a special lifting eye that attaches using one or two of the bolts on the rotary cylinder. The bolts are super tight. I came up with using the all thread idea when I was going to put the rotary cylinder back on. Putting it back on it helps to have a 2nd person to hold it straight so it can fit on the all thread. Have some nuts ready so they can be used to hold the rotary cylinder in place while you slide it forward. When you get close you can use the nuts to carefully push the rotary cylinder square and even so the dowels line up. Once you get it snug you can take the all thread out and put the bolts in 1 at a time. The bolts need to be torqued properly. I forgot to mention to have the blocks on the all thread behind the rotary cylinder. An engine crane could be used to lift the rotary cylinder. Once it's about half way on you can take the sling(s) off as the all thread will hold it. As far as the rotary cylinder repair, if the main shaft is worn, the entire assembly has to come apart and all the seals and vanes removed so the shaft can be built up with spray welding. The spray weld can be a higher hardness than the shaft so it lasts longer. The spray welding was about $340 on mine. When they first showed me the shaft all I saw was $$$$$$$$. Then he told me it could be fixed with metalizing/ spray welding. I highly doubt a new shaft is still available. Only the bottom of my shaft was worn but the spray welding is better than new.