Heres a couple more pics of the 518 FB we converted to a landfill compactor to sho blade heght. The blade is off a 290 M Clark.
how much does it weigh?
I think its around 35000 to 40000 pound range we havent watered the wheels yet. The original Cat 518 skidder conversions are hard to come by for less than 35 to 50000 dollars. We needed a smaller machine than an 816 Cat I told pops about the conversions and scraped a few pictures up. We only get about 12 loads a day and one any bigger would be hard to keep in the small lifts. We are going to build another on standby but make the teeth a shape for soil and rubbish. After buying the machine with low hours from our neighbor for 14000 and redoing all the lines and such we had about 22 in it. A set of remanned wheels for a conversion would have been 50k. Its about 10 000 pounds heaiver than a 518 skidder. When it was built in Canada for Cat as a skidder then a company in Texas bought the frame to make a cutter out of it the rear b umper mounts exactly like the blade did. They turned the controls around and made the boom and the Shear was a Fleco 24 inch soft wood and 18 inch hard. That means it sat alot when it was new around here. We did have a head gasket go bad but thats about it. It really grinds up the material in a few passes. In a few passes she'll chop everything up to about 3 inch peices. The thing with the high lift on it is you can help better spread loads that dont want to roll over. with the D5 sometimes loads of paper would just scoot.and you had to real work to get it under a track to scatter it. One 50 yard can has all masking paper and fiber floor covering from the paint shop, its hell to deal with in the dozer but if its left as it came out in a bale and compacted in place its easy to handle. Also the blade can tilt forward or backwards. Forward tilt it nearly will tilt the top of the spill gaurd about 2 feet off the ground. Thats handy for spreading if you have a load thats got alot of wood in it holding the load together. It really helps it roll off and into thinner layers. The down side is it wont push dirt real good because its feet did holes. I have filled the blade up pretty good when ussing old cover on a previous lift to cover a new lift. I have used it clearing a small thicket of pines on a new site to get cover from. I ran over them some about 6 inches in diameter and it just splinters them then let them dry then pile them. I may post a video next week on You tube, the plant bougth a lot with about 5 old fiberglass ski boat hulls.