Hi, Can you guys give me some feedback about the condition of these pins and lack of grease fittings on my 580 backhoe bucket. What’s the fix? #1 dry , no zerk #2 dry, no zerk, even on the rod end! #3 broken zerk, is this recoverable? #4 dry , no zerk This doesn’t look right to me with no grease and I want to fix it but not sure the way forward. Do all the pins need grease? For the three pins without grease zerk fittings, is pin removal-grease-install the only option? Is that #3 pin with the end broken end zerks recoverable?
Not all pins need grease. A pin working in dirt won't benefit from grease, so 4 I'd leave dry. Replace the pin and bushing on 3 if you want it tighter, or try to replace the zerk, but that pin is pretty far gone for the grease to do much more than make you feel better. The one end zerk looks like it got hammered flat, and should unscrew easy enough. No idea what the other side is, can't see it from the picture, but the threads are probably good enough if there was a zerk there. 1 and 2 don't rotate with as much force on the pin, so they might not need zerks, I'd use moly grease and forget about them. In the big picture, the slop in these pins has little affect on the usability of the hoe. The side to side slop that bounces and doesn't allow you to dig where you think the boom is going is what makes a sloppy hoe hard to use.
[QUOTE="Delmer, post: 979084, member is what makes a sloppy hoe hard to use.[/QUOTE] Nobody likes a sloppy hoe... sorry couldn't resist...
That is a strange looking link combination on the bucket ! If it were mine I would drill the rod eye and put a zerk in it. If you want to do that, drive the pin just a little past the center of the eye. Leave the eye connected to the bucket so that it doesn't move while drilling it. A carbide tipped drill bit will go through the bushing.
Unless you are going to replace all the pins and bushings I would just run it! Putting grease in a gap of the size you can see is is just going to create an area for dirt to get in and make grinding compound. As someone else has stated, slop in those areas does little to hurt actual digging ability.
Thanks for all the comments. The grease with dirt in it being worse than dry makes sense. Are those pins hardened steel ?
All of those linkages at one time should have taken grease (I say that not knowing what model of 580 it is but am still confident that they should all be greaseable). I am guessing that the pins had been replaced and not tapped for a zerk. At this point, it is really a question of what it is worth to you. I would guess all the pins should be replaced with new ones with grease passages, and new bushings of course. You can repair the zerks you have, pulling them out carefully with an easy out should be simple enough if you can't spin them out any other way. Run it as long as you are able. While the grease will attract dirt when you have so much slop, at least you wont have to listen to the screaming of steel on steel every time you run the bucket. At some point and it may have already happened, you will wear through the bushings and then things get more expensive to fix. The pins should be hardened steel. Clearly someone really halfassed that set up so who knows for sure at this point.
It’s a 580e I had a look at how the pins are engineered on a modern machine and these are pretty crude by comparison.
The #2 photo should have a grease fitting in the eye of the rod. But like tinkerer said you can drill it and put one in. Photo #3 should have grease fitting in each end of the pin in the recess hole.
I pulled #3 and gave it the once over: Ground down and cleaned up the ends , grease holes and sn add p ring grooves, added new zerks , snap rings and washers. I even was able to get the old zerk out with an “ez-out” wehich is the first time in my life I’ve had one of those things work for me! The pin has a lot of wear but I t sure feels better now that I can grease it. One pin down , next will be drilling n tapping the cylinder rod eyelet for a zerk fitting.
Looks like that first pin went really well (at least compared to what I've run into). If any broken off zerks give you too much hell; A carbide tipped 7/32 masonry bit will go right through them. Chase threads with a tap and a new zerk will drop right in.
My 680C is similar to that. I have no idea how it was when new. It is not a highly used machine. I put gear oil on all those joints before I use it each time. It has worked OK for about 20 years that way.
Man that thing has been hacked up and beat down. Almost ever 580 we work on has zerks in all those places, including on the rod eyes. I've long been on the grease on everything is good train, if you dig a ton, grease more and get that dirt out, and wash the machine too don't be a slob. Grease and water are cheap, linebore jobs aren't lol.
The two 580K I have had were equipped with 9 grease fittings around the bucket. Both got extensive & expensive new bushings all around the bucket. I now have a John Deere 410C. It has only 2 fittings, one end of dipper, one end of bucket cylinder. At 3500 hours it is just starting to show wear.