seems to me the grinder Questions on here are a bit hit and miss but will give it a go anyways. My grinder is set up with 32 hammers which is a set up for brush which is what it is mainly used for . after I get It fixxed (broke a hammer clean off) I then have a small pile of brush to grind which should take a day or 2 at best I have a mess of logs to atempt to grind . the plain carbide weld inserts dont like this much unless the log is rotting pretty good , so I'm trring to come up with an insert combo that should give me ok wear and actually get me some production done in the process. With out removing hammers and installing rakers I would like to keep the 32 hammer pattern as 1 brush is really the only thing I should be doing after the logs are gone and 2 its a major pain to pull apart to reconfigure hammer pattern. Some of the 2 inch inserts from morbark look promising while other not so much , some are intended to run in combination with a diff style insert . any help or people with experience on this would be awsome Thanks
Hoping a wood grinder guy see this withen the next couple weeks and can help me out with some ideas
You might try the wolf claw. Stay away from the wear wolf. When we had our last morbark we tried the wear wolf and they were shot in 4 hours. What type of logs are you grinding?
previous mechanic bought some wear wolfs but not a full set im going to burn those up and get rid of them ,to much of a hassle taking them back .I was thinking the wolfclaw/wolfbite combo . the standard alpha or lone wolf turn the wood to dust having 32 hammers. logs are a mix they cleared some big rite of way so I have seen popler, cedar, and ash and some others i havent identified. the ash hits the rotor pretty much starts to smoke withen a few seconds .
Do you blokes cut the timber up before grinding or just do whole trees?
I primarly grind nothing but brush , I just so happen to have a bunch of logs we accepted into our limb yard to grind , they can grind mostly whole trees if set up correctly
Did you ever get your new pattern worked out? If so, how many hammers are you running and did it help?
I haven't gotten a chance to get back to it yet they are breaking stuff faster then I can keep stuff fixxed , I have to get some prices on rakers and tell my boss the small screens are for regrind only if he wants smaller chips all I have to do is slow down the infeed a little more , I think for now Im going back with the 30 hammers but i have to sort thru them all and reweigh all of them and sort out the damaged ones in the pile , when I get back to it I will take pictures of some of the work I have done to this unicorn lol
Finally getting back to the reassembly at hand.hoping it goes together better then it came apart. Going to stick with 30 hammers for now boss don't want to buy the rakers rite now so going to try some different inserts when I get thru with brush again. I definitely need to clean it or mow the grass also lol
I think I figured out you problem grinding logs, you don't have any teeth once you get it back together I would like to see what different types of inserts you are using and how the do.
:laugh:duh I bet that pile of heavy stuff I found on a pallet goes in there .I once again got side tracked by more broken stuff soon as I got my hammers weighed and layout on paper to start assembly. should have the rotor back together by Tuesday if it goes smoothly. It took me 2 days to pull all the rods if it takes 2 days to reassemble I'm going to get frustrated with it
I hope it goes back together good for you. I know pulling rods is a pain not that putting them back in is much fun. Did you use a slide hammer to pull them?
Yeah I broke the original that hangs on the machine I had to get a new one from morbark this one appears to be repairable.
You know you had a bad day when you break the slide hammer I had always thought about building a bracket that you could mount on the side of the machine that you put a hydraulic on and use the cylinder to pull the rods.
James River did it the first time was the first time they had been pulled in an unknown amount of years they tried a thru hole ram with the slide hammer on that piece of threaded rod. Long story short the rods came out in little chunks and a lot of oxygen acytelene later. I'm just glad I got them out this time. I had some with a pretty good bow in them took 30-32 tons on the press gauge to tweak them back into some what straight. If I can get this hual truck going today that sprouted a million HYD oil leaks last Friday I'm going to get back on this baby. While this dry cooler weather front is hanging around the South
Thanks for the update. I would not be looking forward to driving those rods. What are you using for lube? We never cut any rods out but when we ran 7600s we would have to burn the bottom screens out every time.
Using some penetrating clear spray grease and some penetrating oil. It is going together smooth hammers and rods will be in today only gonna take about 3 hrs. New inserts and the screens will be tomorrow. I found the hammer pattern I took out was wrong it had them sucking the wood to the outside instead of towards the center that may fix an infeed issue I had at times.will post some more pictures tomorrow. I need to wash whole machine and service everything on it just have to find some 40 weight non detergent oil for the HYD twin disk unit
Ok after 2 hrs of being on the phone with morbark first then twin disc twice , I have a blessing from twin disc on an oil for their pto. I can run my castrol tection extra 15w40 in it without any worries . the technical guy i was talking to at twin disc was reading off cat to2 specs which he was aware of it being obsolete spec then he started with allison c-4 specs which he then saw was also obsolete when i told him . what a pain but hopefully he does what he says and goes to their designers to get rid of there obsolete specs and update there info.
Rotor put back together all left is to service everything , grease, it's getting a bath also.then screens and a tad bit of minor reassembly here and there. Going to be grinding all brush at first so not trying any exotic inserts just yet. Land clearer I have a ? For you I'm primary grinding with 4 Inch hex screens. Boss wants a smaller grind for certain projects on site .how much time and fuel am I going to waste doing a regrind with 2 inch hex screens? And how does doing a regrind wear on my wear parts? I don't know what the actual operating cost are with maintenance and repairs but I have the feeling it's going to almost double if I regrind. I would like to try to make a smaller product without regrind but I already have infeed slowed down to a crawl trying to save the drag chains that are about gone.
I run 4 " screens with a 2" gate on a 2680 Bandit. Regrind doesn't show any extra wear, Fuel usage is minimal on the regrind. Second pass on brush and green waste makes a decent product. Maintenance seems to be there either way.
You ain't lying about maintenance . Every 4 hrs morbark recommends checking rotor, I usually end up doing it more then that because it made a strange clunk or bang or when I here something big clang down the chute off the magnetic roller.
Do you have a pt tech clutch. If so we use Mobil 424 and they are pretty adamant about using that and only that. As for product sizing, we use 3x3 hex on the primary and second grind. Our customers like it very fine. As long as your mulch is clean there is very little wear. Fuel consumption is another thing. When we regrind I check the Iqan screen and with the motor at 100 percent load it says 42 gallons an hour. Wet mulch will grind harder than dry also. I can get you some pics of the single then the double ground if you like.
Twin disc HP 600 model. I have 3 2inch screens so I was thinking on the regrind to drop in one 2inch just to choke up things a bit this might be an experiment in the works. I would take a picture of my primary grind if there was any left any ware I have a bit more work to do but should be grinding some next week . I have feed slowed way down my drag chains are about to break so doing my math I have only been at about 18 gallons an hour with the c16 rated at 639 HP 1900 rpms
That chunk of crap in top right is what started this little project I could probably work for a dealer at this point for all that major things I have repaired on this thing. It's going out to the limb yard in the morning and probably get worked on Wednesday . Going to try running regrind with existing screens to see what it does If anything I will just make a couple piles and regrind one of them and see what it does
Primary grind and new problems Well here is my primary grind with 4inch screens. Now I have to call morbark and get some pressure specs. Bed chains stall really easy,outer conveyor seems slower ,HYD fan for HYD oil cooler quit , and I had to rev engine to fold conveyor. Belly conveyor and yoke feed wheel ok, or it seems to be anyways. I have hyd filter and oil coming soon sure wish morbark would make service manuals for there machines.