Seen this at the Rock River Threshery last weekend. Folks that talked to the dealer reps claimed that they were told it will run 25 MPH with hardly no track noise. Bit different style tracks chains on it. Would have liked to see it work. I goggled it and came up with nothing in the Cat new product line. There is supposed to be three of them going to a project somewhere in the next couple of weeks. Sorry I did not get more pictures. Got caught up in everything else going on.
Yair . . . Looks to be some mechanical carryon/doodad right there in the bowl, some sort of auger maybe? Cheers.
How the heck do you check the oil?How do you even get in it?Pretty fancy stuff,thanks for the pics. Ron G
The scraper part actually looked very conventual except for a 6" deeper cutting edge in the center section of the front lip of he bowl. They claim to self load easily. I wonder if because they call it a 5510T they will also be making a wheeled version.
I believe that cutting edge arrangement is called a stinger
that machine was at con expo a few shows ago. if I remember correctly it is built and sold by a contractor in the mid west
O-I-H, Thanks for posting that, I saw it at the Rock River show too, but do to a severe case of CRS, I forgot the numbers and when I went on Cat's site as you said nothing about it on there. I worked for the contractor whose name is on this one for almost 25 yrs til I retired, a buddy still works there and said they had a few on a job and they worked good in soft ground where the 627's struggled and the haul was to far for cat and pans. I didn't get any feed back on how they were to run. I even went on the contractors site in the equipment list and job videos couldn't find them there either, I did find a picture of me in my JD 772 at the ADM switch yard.....As Bob Hope always sang "Thanks for the Memories"
I sure would have liked an opportunity to take it out in the big toy playarea for a few loads and dumps. That hard soil at the show would have been a great test for it.
I saw it at the con expo it seemed pretty cool. I had pictures of it but they are on my computer.
It had Caterpillar all over it. I wonder if it is like some of the other new Cat stuff. A dealer modifies a machine to suit a condition and if sucessful Cat picked up on it. Pererson Cat comes to mind with the enhanced push Cats back in the scraper heyday.
Nyen Excavating in MN had one for a year or two. A frenemy of mine had his twins running with it. The way it sounded his 30-40 year old 27's broke down less then this new thing. It had lots of track problems. I remember watching it load painfully slow in hard clay and had tons of track noise at speed. Maybe that was before the pre scalloped rails and rubber coated roller/idler everything...
I put a drop center in my Deere this spring. If you have never ran one, you wouldn't believe me if I told you how much it changes a scraper. Full load, EVERY load. You can just keep right on going, boiling the dirt over the sides. At least that's how it was on my Cat and Deere this spring. Only problem with it is all you can do is hog dirt. I'm a one man/machine operation. I have to be able to do finish work with my rig. But, if I ever get a huge dirt job, the stingers will be going back on.
Cat did/does make an auger bowl for 27's; I bet it would work well for this application too. I am not certain how they unload though, perhaps the floor slides back behind the cutting edge like the Michigans used to.
I talked to the Rep at the site. He said it goes 18 MPH. It has cylinders to lift the back end as well as the front of the bowl. He said this gives the bowl greater clearance in mud and also can be used to change the cutting edge angle. Ferdie said he would stick with a 14A and 435 combo! At over 1 Mil price tag you would have to move a lot of dirt. He claims you get 3000 hours on those rubber coated idlers! I offered to try it out for him in the Playpen but no luck! Doug
At that price, dirt better be worth a whole lot more than I have seen it go for. I like the idea, but for a million bucks you could have 6 pretty good used 637's and have enough money left over for mechanics and parts to run them for a good long while, and without all of the electrical faults to deal with.
Yair . . . Interesting discussion. As an outsider looking in it seems to me there is a growing disconnect between the cost of machines and their earning potential in the "real world" contracting/bid situation. It would be interesting to see Caterpillars projected production numbers and the "dollars per yard" they come up with to justify the running and financing cost of such a specialised machine. The machine seems to be based on an ADT and (I think) Volvo pioneered the concept of a scraper bowl on such a unit. To me that made sense as the ADT's had high speed capability and on long hauls made for a potentially productive unit . . . now Cat seem to have negated that advantage by putting the ADT on tracks. What would this machine do that other machines won't? I believe JDOFMEMI is spot on with his comments in the #15 post and the 637's are not going to have conniptions should they see a bit of rock. Cheers.
looks like a bigger and more expensive deere Bison. I'll take a 435 and a 8k
These are made by mobile track solutions out of elkader iowa, this is the same company that built the eject pull scrapers,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z34Ov_Xi1mU Here's a video of the Mobile Track Solutions MT-450 looks like maybe cat finally bought the idea and is going to start production.
Thanks for posting the video. The hitch is totally different on the Cat 5510T than on the one on the video. It was a fast paced video but I would have liked to see a video of it in real time loading and working with machine sound. I can get music noise anywhere.
try this one .......... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuzOqKM3fFE what amazes me watching the operator bouncing up & down is how rough it rides
Yeah for sure. The Volvo Full-Suspension trucks with a cushion ride Scraper would help smooth that drive out a lot.
I think the producer of that first video was on an acid trip. Does anybody know what that truck weighs with that track setup?? A few observations I have are (1) It looks clumsy and takes 20 acres to turn around, (2) It would be deadly on a spoil pile unless you made the pile 100' wide and dedicated a dozer to maintaining the pile, and (3) The only application I can see this being more productive than tires or rubber tracks is in rock conditions.
Surely the idea is flotation so that it can work on really soft ground where a machine on tyres would be getting bogged. Those tracks, or more likely the bgoie wheels and all the rubber-covered components would get destroyed on rock IMO.
Yair . . . Agreed. As stated in my #16 post, I reckon that setup would have conniptions real fast if you put it into rock. Cheers
Neat little track/bogie arrangements, but I fail to see the point of hacking a 740 and box into one unit. Why not just bolt four of them onto a 37 or 57?
It seemed to me like a sledgehammer to crack a nut kind of solution too ...... unless 4 of those units are not capable of supporting the weight of a loaded 37/57 maybe...?
Maybe it's the proverbial 'answer to the question that nobody asked'
As someone who has been pulling a pan around for around 15 yrs with rubber belts, I'm just trying to understand the mentality of this setup. I'm not trying to disagree at all, if you got into big, nasty rock conditions like I think you guys are envisioning, I believe those tracks wouldn't stand a chance either. So, the million dollar question. What kind of job does someone want these for?? Are they going to last longer than quadtrac belts? Are they going to handle a MINOR rock application (small % of softball to football size rocks) better? I say this from experience because those are the size rocks that can tear a belt to shreds very quickly if the operator isn't paying attention. Are they going to be more productive in wet, greasy conditions? A quad will go until it's so wet you shouldn't be out there anyway.
All I can point to is that every video I could find on YouTube showed the machines working in soft sloppy dirt ..........
Now this has really got me thinking. How do these stack up price-wise and running cost-wise against either a Challenger, Quadtrack or D7/8? Whatever the pros and cons, one of the killers with a steel tracked machine is speed, these are steel tracked, so how well do the tracks last? I'd love to see the state of the running gear after a few hundred hard hours, whatever they're working in. The only saving grace I can see is that the tracks are turning rather than slewing. Also got to say, Nige, the videos I watched showed some pretty dry, hard-packed soil being moved.
Point taken, but one thing I didn't see anywhere was rock of any kind. Not one.
Agreed, Nige. Mind you, if I was running scrapers I wouldn't want to see rocks of any kind.
i've seen one off these cat's in germany. I don't know if they wil go 25mph on those tracks tho.. i worked on a STX quad trac where we build a steel track system on. his Case was also for scraping and they had big issues with keeping the rubber tracks in one piece. They weren't allowed to go past the 10-12mph cause the bulldozer tracks can't handle that speed that well.