I was driving this last week for a couple of days.It was picked up at auction for abit of yard use.We cleaned and serviced it,put 4 tyres on it and started using it. It seems a sound enough littke machine and I decided to extend the arm out as to take a nosey. Clearly its previous owners had never greased the telescopes on it.There’s no operators manual for it yet,but I couldn’t look at the bare metal rubbing without painting whatever grease I could find onto it. I’m not sure if it will do it any good,but it makes me feel better. We did buy some proper chain oil for it yesterday,so I’ll get that onto it on Friday.
The problem with using regular grease on those is the dirt that sticks to it. The grit gets sucked into the wear pads and over time grinds them into nothing. We always used a dry graphite lube unless the manufacturer speced otherwise.
lube a boom is the best it seems as far as keeping the jumping down winter or summer , that grease gets dirt in it + in winter it gets extremely sticky
Don't some extensions have Teflon or some kind of replaceable wear pads?
Congrats Nicky! A tele is handier than a shirt pocket on the yard. FWIW - We've putting regular grease on our Gradall 534D6 since we bought it new back in 1998. The machine was used heavily until the late 2000's and since 2010 has been lightly used in our yard. No real notice in wear on the boom or build up of dirt or other debris. Now I will dodge the water balloons.... YMMV.
Grease or not grease, your choice. But a couple of things to consider. 1) most telescoping booms use UHMW wear pads, which is a slick abrasion resistant plastic, they're already slick, don't really need to be slicky-er. But hey, if you wish to make it slicky-er, again, your choice, but that brings us to point 2), you're only slicky-er-ing the outer boom wear pads, you're not, and can't, lubricating the inner boom wear pads. I suggest you inspect your wear pads and see if they need replacement, especially removing the rear cover of the boom and inspect the inner wear pads with the boom fully retracted.
Bet if you open up the back cover on the boom the wear pads back there will have grease fittings on them. At least most of the JLG/CAT units do.
Sorry for the late reply. I was kind of unsure about greasing it and potentially even making it worse. I ran quite a few towed Cat 435 and 463 scrapers over the years and used to overgrease the ropes and the sliding tobogans in the tunnel.I was never really sure wether it was a good idea or bad. For sure,it would attract dust,but I’d chuck more grease on. The problem was,I just couldn’t stand to see that bare metal going unlubricated.
Personally, I use Zep 2000 on telehandler booms. I think that a local Gradall dealer once told me that it was factory recommended because it didn't attract dirt.