Talked recently with a few hoe guys and all seem to have a different take. I was discussing loading gravel from a pile. I can never seem to get that right and end up pulling that pile to me a bit, and starts to get pretty frustrating. All seemed to have a different process but explanation was not exactly 'helpful'..... One of the things talked about is the use of swing for either grading or even digging. I fully understand the geometry and stress forces into the stick, boom, swing box, etc, but I still find it pretty much required to use swing for leveling stuff and even for digging in a spoil pile. I don't use for direct digging but the swing has little power to do much there anyway. I am curious if you guys have any good tech vids, articles, etc? You take one look at youtube and all you get is beginners on minis telling you "how to operate".... I'd be curious to know if swing leveling will eat pins up in short order or say 5k or more hours? I certainly will never smack anything in swing but I do push enough loose material to stall in slow swing. I sort of consider the action as required to get the job done. There seems to be a lot of 'opinion' based practices and I am curious if there are some documented data such as that in ump turns. Seems obvious that ump turns are easier on the UC. Is that just using the swing to assist the ZTR turn? Or how high you need the tracks to make this work best? All in all, it would seem there should be an "advanced" training course for this stuff, and I am sure somewhere, CAT and others probably offer some expensive, wine/dine seminars with test toys to explain some of this. I don't need the wine, but would like the info.
Some Cat dealers do offer excavator op training for various skill levels. I managed a dealer training dept. that did such a thing. Look at some dealer websites in your area. Cat corporate offers it as well at the Tinaja Hills Training Center. Plus, I contracted much of the training to T2 which is where many of the bigger contractors and unions got it through. The Local Highway Technical Assistance Council.
the turns are easier on the work area too. I lift high enough that I am not dragging material sideways. If you manage your track motors in a coordinated manner there is little load on the swing gear or boom/stick. That should be your goal, work on that so it is all track motors and you are just suspending weight.
There are some decent You Tube videos on it.
It's just like anything else, learning from others, and learning from your own experience. I'm not a hoe man. I don't have any interest in it. But there are times when I don't have a lot of choice. Lifting up and turning was something I learned long ago, and I have suggested it to new guys having issue turning in soft material. I learned on machines with no thumb. A lot of machines, especially the smaller ones, I have found the thumb to be over powered, and you end up breaking the asphalt you are trying to pick up. Someone mentioned to me to get the thumb close, and then curl the bucket to grab it. Fairly obvious, but I never thought of it, and now I do it. If there is a lot of material to load from a pile, I like to position myself high enough that I can see over the tale gate, being a grader man, I prefer looking down to looking up. I dig beside my pad, so there is a bit of a trench beside me, and I can pull the material from the pile into it. I learned this when pulling down the muck pile in the quarry after a blast. Any big rocks fall into the hole beside you. Most of our machines up to the 225 have the ditching bucket with them all the time, so it can be easier to load out of a pile crushed material. If I can't be on the pile, I reach over the pile a bit, take a bucket, and the push down and away when I go for another bucket. If I level with the swing, I don't push more then the machine can handle, seen a lot of 400 Hitachis with cracked booms when I was truck driver. They had a guy that would swing and hit the material hard. There is a guy here now that has been putting water and sewer in the ground since we graduated high school in 1990. He can do anything with an excavator. Guy retired a couple years ago. Started here running asphalt roller in 1972. got on a rubber tire back hoe along the way, ad he could do stuff with a backhoe, or an excavator, and I wouldn't even have to grade it after. These are the guys I try and take my hints from, either watching or asking.