Greetings from Maine. I have recently purchased a Liebherr R912 LC. The excavator had been sitting non-running for 12 years. My story is much the same as the last person to post about an R912 on this forum.I too have a JD backhoe loader. Mine is on tracks. It wasn't up to the task of pulling the large pine tree stumps I want to remove. I was looking for an excavator that I could afford to do the job. A non-running Liebherr R912 came up for sale about 35 miles away from me. I purchased it. Long story short I got it running on about 2.5 cylinders. Enough to self load on to a 70 ton trailer and get it to my place. I have ordered 4 head gaskets. My question for the forum is this. Has anyone had the experience of operating this particular model excavator? It has 3 pedals on the floor. I know 2 are travel pedals. What is the third on the left for? There was an old operators manual behind the seat. It is in bad shape. It didn't seem to apply to this particular model. The controls were different. Also the specs said it had a Deutz air cooled diesel. Mine has a Liebherr D904NA water cooled diesel motor. The Speeder designation came from the Fram oil filter catalog for this application. Any information regarding this machine would be greatly appreciated.
I went and took a photo of the pedal arrangement for further clarification.
The pedal on the left is the swing brake, the speeder designation is for a A912 (wheeled model). If you have to change the head gaskets don't use the old head bolts as they should be replaced with new, if I remember correctly there are three or four different gaskets for these engines, when you take off the old one check for small half moon cut outs on the edge, one ,two or three or no cut outs tell you the one you need assuming that the liner protrusion is still correct
Thank you for the information. Parts are at a premium. The local Liebherr dealer quoted me $160.00 each and didn't say anything about the possibility of different gasket designations. I ordered a set from Energy Choice Parts in Massachusetts. They only listed one part number. I haven't removed the heads yet. I was going to wait until I got the gaskets.
Time for an update. I finally received head gaskets. Took about 6 weeks to get them from overseas because of Covid shutdown of air travel. Had some warm weather last week and got them installed. I think I found the root cause of the lost head gasket. When refilling the coolant tank I noticed a drip coming out of the end of a hose laying on a metal cover under the engine. I followed the hose back to a connection behind the oil filters. I looked for where the other end should have gone and found a 3 way with one of its branches plugged with a 3/4"bolt. I removed the bolt and reattached the hose. I have added 6 gallons of coolant so far. I have to buy some more. Wondering what other surprises are lurking in the future.
Good luck, hope all goes well
I wonder why that hose was blanked off? Removed a cab heater perhaps?
Photo would help
Next day I noticed a drip under cab. Removed the metal plate under machine in that area for inspection. Appears to be coming from cab heater core. I bypassed the heater by connecting the coolant lines before the heater. Added more coolant. Started the machine. I let it run for 30 minutes. No leaking. Now on to tightening track pad bolts. I did pull the big stump out that was the original reason for buying the excavator. That made me smile.