i am a complete newbie to excavators, i have greased, changed fluids on everything needing it, the last thing i was lubing was the gearbox reducer...per the direction, i opened the air plug, which was on the opposite side of the gear reducer from the grease fitting and started adding grease until it came out of the air plug, however after a whole tube it didnt come out...i thought that maybe the air outlet was maybe plugged, so i pushed the allen wrench into it and there was grease on the tip..so i assumed it wasnt blocked...but since the specs say that it only holds 1 liter, i thought I better not add anymore...should i keep going till it comes out?, did i add to much already?
ohh, its a case 9030b
i think i will rotate the turntable a few times and then open up the air plug and see if i get some grease coming out..just dont wont to blow out a seal or something from overfilling...
I wouldn't worry about blowing a seal out if you are following the directions with the plug out. One liter is about 4 tubes, so it wouldn't surprise me too much to have to add more than one tube of grease. I hope you don't have to add four full tubes though!
ya, i hope it doesnt take 4 either!!!!, i might rotate it around a bit then open up and maybe add a little more...the machine has about 4k hours on it, i dont think this grease fitting has been greased much.
That is that fine Sumitomo engineering. No other manufacturer uses grease in the swing pinion bearing and most people didn't even know it needed to be greased till the bearing burned up. You didn't say how many hours were on the machine but it isn't a hard assumption to make that the bearing has never been greased since the machine was new. If the book says fill till grease comes out, then that is what you should do. I haven't seen grease expand with heat enough to force a seal out of its landing. In this case it is likely the seal lip is pointing down into the swing pinion tub anyway. Any excess will just push out into the tub.
thanks for the advice, it has roughly 4500 hours on it...i think it called for regreasing at either 3k or 4k, but will put the grease gun to it. so case was engineered by sumitomo?, i have heard that there are machines with different names that are the same as the case 9030b, do you know which these are?