One thing that has always frustrated me is the trash some operators leave in the cab of equipment. How some of these operators can sit in this filth for 8-10 hours a day I don't understand. I understand that if you are digging a ditch in a swamp and have to get in and out of the cab during the day it will get dirty. Not what I'm talking about. It's the piles of used rags, apple cores, coffee cups and so on.:Banghead I just pull wrenches in the shop so don't have power over the operators, but I do make my point as much as possible. Anytime I have to service or do major repairs on a machine and the cab is full of trash I toss it out and leave it in a pile on the shop floor as long as possible in hopes the boss will see it. This has worked some as he has mentioned it at meetings and things are better than a few years ago. Okay I'll stop b1tching for now.
It does suck. the mechanics puled 39 pop bottles out from behind the seat of a excavator one day. he was bitchin the heat was not working. I find it all the time. how hard is it to take it out at the end of the day. You know they would be pissed if you took their vehicle to lunch and left the trash in it.
I have a wisk broom in my excavator and backhoe, if it is dry I sweep it out about every night when done. I hate the look of a filthy cab.
It's not just equipment, road tractors, dump trucks, service trucks, pickups too!. Trash is a big safety issue and needs not to be taken lightly in the cabs. I have found many things in cabs that should not be on any job site over the years. Along with the broken bottles, spit, pee bottles, butts, starting fluid cans with no tops leaking, gas cans. You wonder why they haven't blown themselves up with all the ashes on the floor matt. I have soaked some lower seats just to prove a point to some when the bosses would not take action to clean out the closed cabs on equipment, one operator asked me why his seat was so wet, I told him I set his drink bottles in the seat and it must have leaked some, he was worried which bottle it was, and I said guess. Never had a issue with him again about keeping his cab clean.
I talked to a guy that owned a small readymix company , he had four old trucks in good working order and the drivers never stopped bitching about the age of the trucks they had to drive. One winter he bought four late model trucks in really nice shape, on friday night of the first week back in the spring, he walked up to every truck and opened all the doors and checked the cabs, two of the drivers got fired on the spot, the cabs where full of coffee cups and mud.
Wisk brooms are supplied for all machines, just some guys have yet to figure out how to operate them!
I like! :tong
then theres the day,you go out to one of the trucks that has stopped. you clean the worst of the junk away and tilt the cab forward . you are working on fuel system and you hear a noise, one of them drink bottles that you have missed. has just dropped through the front window. so now after you have got it ggoing you have to get a new front screen . Happened to me
in the 1980s I worked for Hamptead Plant, Brierley Hill, West Midlands.They had 29 JCB 3Cs at the time and as a spare driver I could be driving any of them.There was one who had an "operator" who pissed in the back foot well.I refused to drive it as the stench was horrific. The man had a kidney complaint I was told!:beatsme
A pet hate of mine. The only solution I've found that worked is (provided you have management backup) to refuse to work on the machine until the operator is called and cleans the cab to the mechanic's satisfaction before work starts on the machine. We're trying a system here where the operator stays with his machine for PM and helps the mechanics. The first job he's set to do is get the cab interior clean and sparkling......
I have had operators that were too lazy to climb off thier loader and just stood out on the platform to relieve themselves and they were the ones that had to fuel up loader at the end of day and on a 980 G cat the tank is right under the platform!
Maybe this isn't realistic in the hectic world of construction but I have worked some long days as a truck driver. What I do is eat my breakfast before I come to work, then drive all morning. When it is lunch time I pull over briefly and eat my lunch from my lunch pail, and when it is gone I put my lunch pail away and drive until evening, then I go home and eat my supper. In between times I drink from a 1 gallon jug of water that I refill from the faucet. If I spill any in the truck it doesn't bother much because it just dries up. This system serves me well because it 1. reduces calories consumed 2. reduces costs from convenience store and restaurant food 3. reduces trash and sticky messes because there isn't much to happen 4. gives me time to clear my head mid day and strategize but otherwise keeps me moving and there are other benefits as well.
That's what I've done for years also.
Might be a saftey issue,maybe something that the saftey boss needs to look at.Just a thought.
I'm a neat freak, everything is armor-all'd in the cab, the boots for the joysticks, the rubber skirting around air ride seats, EVERYTHING! I wax the exterior, and windows get done with rain-x, I keep a Dewalt 18volt vac with me also. I go as far as spraying the floor with tire shine, they stay cleaner that way, and easier to sweep the dust and dirt off the floor. I generally run the same hoe and grader, but the random time that someone else runs it, they are usually to scared to fart in the seat. I don't spend any extra time doing these things either, down time, is shine time. When all the other guys are shooting the breeze, I get to cleaning.
Sounds like a machine I'd like to work on, but then if you take that care of it you probably have fewer breakdowns. I'm sure while you are cleaning you will spot a loose screw and either tighten it of have mechanic take care of it. Probably don't have problems with the joysticks getting gummed up from the sugar and cream in the coffee that gets spilled on them. You also sound like an operator we had at one of our plants years ago. I was there working on another machine and he came over to have me check on a leak on one of the tilt cylinders of his 988 Cat. I spent fifteen minutes crawling over that machine trying to find even a drop of oil. Never saw a drop. He said must have just been a drop of water as he was sure he saw something! Wish there were more like that, he treated that loader like his job depended on it. Too many today don't understand that principal.
YOU'RE HIRED ! When can you start ! Guys like you are few and far between. :thumbsup
i cant stand a dirty machine. i keep the inside as clean as possible and Saturday is wash day for me i clean my truck backhoe skid steer and trailer
I used to wash out the cab of my Gehl Ctl 60 all the time. I realized quick that it was useless because it is not pressurized. This sounds bad but the dirtier it is the better it seals off the cab. That's the only machine like that. I keep a roll of blues , glass cleaner, hand broom and a small dash duster in every cab.
Thanks guys, it's a respect thing I guess, and your reputation/image revolves around all of that. If the company I work for trusts me with a half million dollar machine, the least I can do is keep it in a nice presentable form. I try to lead by example, but it doesn't always work, most guys anymore don't care the least bit about the presentation of their machine, and those same guys don't care one bit about the presentation of the work they do. It all goes hand in hand, an operator that cares about his machine, cares about his work, and he cares about his reputation. Don't lower your standards because someone else refuses to raise theirs.
don't ask me why but a clean machine tends to break alot less
For the simple reason like I was saying to bigshow, while you are cleaning it you are looking at it. If the parts are covered with dirt and grease three inches thick how are you going to spot that loose bracket holding the hyd. line in place. You won't know there is a problem till oil is spraying all over the machine! Then all that dirt is soaked with oil and even harder to clean off so it doesn't get cleaned and the process continues. And when a mechanic is trying to repair that hyd. line that failed it's going to be impossible to not get trash in the system so next thing you know pumps are giving problems.........:Banghead
I think a guy that is going to clean a machine is less likely to ignorantly run a machine. He is aware of everything about the machine and has a very high attention to detail. It used to be that operators were a professional bunch, they took pride in what they did, and what they did it in. Now it's just a bunch of cowboys all hopped up on mountain dew that couldn't dig their way out of a paper bag......
Good post, I take pride in my equipment and it really pisses me off to have to clean up after operators, they can take their trash home just as easy as the brought it. Sunflower seed eaters are the worst.
Had a late model kobelco excavater back a few years ago that kept having electrical issues with the ecm they said over a period of months. opened the door to the cab and started throwing all the coke cans and lunch bags and other crap out from behind the seat, removed the covers and found the ecm covered in all these little **** ants. unhooked the batteries and started cleaning and spraying and blowing the ecm and the rest of cab, 2 years later it was still working fine after I told management what I had done.
Had been starting to think I was the only operator with this issue. As I used to be a onwer operator I got used to keeping my stuff clean, and also understand what it worth. So when given fairly new equipment to use I took pride in it, doesnt seem others I work with do the same. We swap machines a lot where i am and bottles rolling around under your feet in the dirt and mud is just normal. The one that took the cake was the morning I opened up the door of a back hoe to be greated with the smell of garlic sause. Dont have an issue with people eating and drinking in plant and trucks etc, however at the end of the day at least take your rubish with you and sweep the floor out, should be less than 5 mins?
tobacco spit and cigarettes in general, nothing like setting in an ash tray all day. Then going home smelling like you smoked a carton of cigarettes that day.
That reminded me of one of our smaller plants I go to once in a while to fix something the boss/loader operater had a 1 lb coffee can for the spit in the cab of his loader I was careful not to spill that!
They want to run equipment with the cab full of trash and the doors open then whine because the AC don't cool good
It astounds me the way people live in filth, its pure and simple laziness. What is so difficult about keeping a small shopping bag in the cab for your rubbish? Most operators down here take their home cooked meal with them in a tupperware, and a two litre coke bottle with water as their sustenance for the day. but the example they follow is the one set by the boss; if he has an "I don't give a damn, make the thing work so I can get money" attitude, the operator will not give a damn about the machine just so he can get his pay at the end of the month. I have seen a contractor who makes sure his harvesters and forwarders are washed at least every second week (every week is better for them, but not always easy on the remoter sites) and greased every day at refuelling with the mechanic present, and every machine always has a can of cockpit shine with a rag. When they had to bring in another harvester from a different contractor the mechanic swore himself blind for the sad state that machine was in.
I thought once about cleaning out the cab and throwing it in their car to see how they like it, chickened out though
If their car is anything like the machine they probably wouldn't notice!
I got to say, I am pretty fortunate where I work, not everyone is as nutts as I am about the sparkle factor. However, my fellow employees are not usually hogs either, I have yet to find any bottles, sandwich bags, or any junk like that. Most operators get a half hour headstart on the crews to do the greasing, cleaning, checking things out type of stuff, so that helps. We take coffee and lunch religiously so no one sits in the cab to chow down and we are all in the "if you bring it with you, take it home with you" mentality. Some of my other pet peeves are scratched counterweights, or anything else, filthy grease guns, equipment not lined up/parked at night with the fuel caps easily accessible and guys that don't clean their tracks, brought up old school I guess, but hey, to each their own.
Here are a couple pictures of the hoe I run, I ran out of tire shine today, so the floor is not real shiny, but it is clean.
Bigshow you are slipping, in the picture with the wisk broom the steering column has a scuff mark on it on the lower lest side!
It's tack coat, I had it on my boot a long time ago and haven't gotten it off. If you look real close by the toe kick for the column adjuster there's a little chunk of blacktop goop stuck to the floor mat, how'd you miss that one?
Damn! Now you are making us all look bad, even the ones who take the time to clean! I just finished a small parking lot job - clearing, a little storm and light grading. It has been dusty as the 1930's with no rain and my loader and skid steer are filthy. Both went back to the shop for a thorough cleaning.:cool2
This is a sample of what I have cleaned out of one cab. This was in a Cat 769 C haul truck, a very small cab so this pill made it even tighter. This was a several years ago I have to give our current drivers credit they are nowhere this bad. I should have taken a picture of a Komatsu WA500 that was on loan to our plant this spring, would have made this one look clean.
Hey, at least you got a couple of "entertaining" magazines out of the deal, ( If the pages weren't stuck together)
I don't know why bigshow, but I wasn't expecting a 318, haha. I agree about the counterweights, it's lazy and a little unsafe to just start swinging into stuff. I wrap my grease gun in an old shirt to keep it clean and if it gets hot and leaks a bit, keep wherever it's sitting clean too. I do my best to keep my cab clean on ... whatever I'm running that time, I really hate cleaning the windows till they are spotless, and then after weeks of no rain, coming in one morning after it rained and having to start all over :Banghead
Rdo said they are voiding warranties due to dirty cabs. They said mud gets in the pedals and causes them to malfunction sometimes activating the brakes and not releasing them.
Don't know about warranties, but more than once I have been asked to check out a "transmission problem" on a front end loader to find the real problem to be mud and dirt under the left brake/neutralizer peddle holding it down just enough to actuate the neutral valve in the transmission.
Or the throttle that won't return since there is 1/2" of mud under it.
I know a guy that had some problems with his brakes hanging up on a 680K, went through two brake cans and a bunch of headaches to realize it was mud under the pedal. It was enough that it was actuating the brakes.
Weve done several wet brake jobs when they start overfilling the diffs because the brakes were burnt out from mud holding the brake pdals down just that little bit
yes I"ve seen this also, guys complaining about no high idle or their engine brake not working because of all the dirt under the fuel peddle go figure.
One place I worked had one driver was a bit of a pig and his cab was his pig pen and hog wallow all in one. The boss kept telling it to clean it out or he would get one of the mechanics to do it. Well after about a week of telling him, I got the task. The boss told me to open both doors and take a fire hose to it, take the camp radio out first (Just a note here, truck was an old Hayes HDX off hiway logging truck, not much electrics in it) I had a riot, hosed the roof off, stuck the hose down the defroster, washed all the garbage off the floor. But the best part was the seat, boy did it get special attention. I soaked it, must have taken a week to dry. Man was operator PO'd BUT The next time the boss said something about his cab was getting a little dirty inside and he was going to get me to clean it again. The truck got cleaned right away
I don't armor all the floor mats, but I keep a clean cab and especially windows on anything I run. I have flat out refused to run machines a few times because the cabs were absolutely filthy with dip-spit, sunflower seeds, butts and other crap. The cab is my office for at least 8 hours a day, I want it reasonably clean.
Q, I can respect that, I don't expect anyone to armor all their floor. It's just something I do, O.C.D. sucks, plus I'm a finish grade hand so it's not like I really get dirty. For windows I've found using a squeegee with a scrubber side works best for me on windows, it's a lot faster and more efficient than paper towels, plus I save the company money by not using towels. I just don't understand how people can sit in a pig stye, it takes less than a minute to sweep the floor out, and another minute to wipe off the dash with an old rag.