Does anybody have an estimate of the potential hours in an undercarriage? I expect the explanation of differing conditions, and operators. Even the high school memory booster Texas Girls Can Fight And Other Queer Things Can Do For hardness; talc, gypsum, calcite, fluorite, anthraclaise, orthaclaise, quartz, diamond, will make a difference. grain size will be important. Sand is easier on track than 6" crushed. Is there a guideline? can an average undercarriage be expected to last 5000 hours? or 10000? I have friends with a Dresser TD7E with 27000 hours. I'm not certain, but believe it has original undercarriage. Moving hours I'd be hard pressed to guess. They are Kool Aid Drinking believers in the run it all day philosophy. They start a machine in the morning, may, or may not use it that day. Sometimes they forget to shut it off that night. The tractor is a shrine, it is used only to smooth topsoil. Mine will lead a different life. It'll be used to move earth, logs, snow, build roads, and now and then it'll get used to flatten a meadow, or refill a power line ditch. How long might a 70% undercarriage last? Willie
Here in IL I estimate 4000hr on chain bottom rollers and sprockets. twice that on front idlers and top rollers. that's aftermarket ITR undercarriage. we have good dirt easy on undercarriage. I would rate sand as one of the worst things that eats undercarriage.
Mine may, or may not be original. The hour meter is dresser original equipment, but is it correct? Bottom rollers, front idler, and top roller look good. Track chains look good with plenty of meat left on chain rub surfaces. Sprockets aren't yet pointed, or rounded, chain elongation is less than 1/16 per pin, bushings, where they contact sprockets are ovaled somewhat.
My location in alaska you can get about 3000-4000 hours on an under carriage, usually the idler is still ok. In the rock they seem to last 2000 hours or less, a shot rock site where I used to live in juneau long ago had a new d8 and it had 2300 hours, and had just had the new undercarriage installed(asked my father why a new dozer was getting torn down haha). My second case 450b has 6400 hours on the original undercarriage, but it is in a spot with almost no gravel and all muskeg and clay. Topsoil guy near my shop has a old d6d with the original undercarriage he says, his father bought it when he was a kid brand new, all he does is push his topsoil around and some light gravel pushing. It has probably 5000 hours, but is a good 30+ years on that undercarriage. Looks worn out now. My fathers d3g lgp has 2400 hours now with a good undercarriage still, and a lot of that is gravel and high speed. And the last 2100 hours of that is rental, so its been abused.
Do you mean 2700 hours instead of 27,000? 2700 could very well be original, 27,000 not a chance. Most undercarriage has a 3 or 4000 hour warranty or 2 or 3 years.
The 27000 hours I'm sure of. These people are obsessed with the benefits of letting it run. Most of that 27000 hours is idling. They are so careful with the crawler. They have track loaders, wheel loaders, and too many excavators to count. The dozer doesn't arrive until the day before the grass seed. No, I'm not sure the undercarriage is original, I am sure it's worn out at this time. Willie
If that undercarriage really has 27,000 hours on it then IMHO it should be pulled off and displayed as an exhibit in the Smithsonian...........
LOL Nige
As an example of a metal we know in the trade as Unobtainium........
+1. I was on a D6K working in granite sand, and it took 60% out of the undercarriage in about 400 hours running. I've heard of guys running SALT in ordinary sand and running out of adjustment after 800-1000 hours. I think it pulverises and gets through the seals. Also, if you slot sand too deep, it runs round the blade and you end up running with the machine's weight on the edge of the grousers, and the chains are trying to twist all the time, rather than running flat.
Track will last a lot longer too if you don't backup fast, as in 3rd gear. When you backup hot, that pop pop sound is your bushings and sprocket dying. My 2 cents!
Yair . . . ih100 Spot on I say, that has been my experience too . . . I have watched machines doing this and you can hear the poor bloody walking gear screaking and complaining. In the sometimes heated discussions on slot dozing I have raised that point and also the sides of the slot falling in and putting sand and even clay and rocks through the track chains and sprocket . . . that's why I like wide blades. I believe you will always get better track life out of a machine with a wide angle blade than one pushing one of those miserable narrow sloppy carry ons called "U" blades or summat. Blade shape makes no bloody difference when the tractor is in a slot, with the wide job the machine sits and pushes flat and mostly not on the tailings along the outer edges. You are the first bloke to make that observation in thousands of posts I have read over the years . . . I am not alone after all. (Big Grin) Cheers.
What state is your GGGGranville in? Granville NY is 14 miles from me. Willie
Our G-G-Granville is in a poor old state. Google "Open All Hours - BBC". Scrub, we've got a lot of cohesive clays and soils here that you'd struggle to get a straight blade into if you haven't got a ripper on. Unfortunately a lot of our plant hire and contractors see a ripper as an expense rather than a saver. First time I used a semi-U I thought it was the dogs' but now, apart from on a bulk strip or re-instatement, I wouldn't say thank you. If I was buying one for the type of work I've mostly done, it'd be a straight blade and a three-shank. Or a drott.
Undercarriage denial is a real phenomenon. The only way to know if you really have 70% is to get the specs and measure yourself.
Careful with u/c ratings, I've seen undercarriage that looked like this with "only 1000 hrs on u/c, 85% remaining."
I don't know at what percentage my undercarriage is. There is 4" of travel left in the track adjusters, other measurements I have mentioned. I haven't stretched track to accurately measure track pitch. I've downloaded procedure to assess undercarriage, but not yet done it all. It appears to me the worst wear is to the bushings where they have met the sprockets, they are noticeably ovaled, worn in perhaps 1/8" deep.
Quite frankly that undercarriage is comprehensively Donald Ducked.........
No, it's the new System Two with rounded rails to match the idler.
Yair . . . ih100 I have been beating the "for production it must be ripped" drum for so long now I just don't care any more. I used to see it all the time, a decent tractor working with a set of hooks on the back not being used . . . just because they can get a "good boil going" they seem to think they're playing hell. When bulk moving cohesive clays, gravels and hard dry sunbaked soils unless the blade will bury in less than half a tractor length the material is not in a fit state for pushing . . . the way to do this is to rip and push out the full depth of the rip (say two feet in the case of a D8H) in one pass. In a lot of our soils it is best to drop the centre tine as it can cause big lumps to pull out particularly in the first couple of floors in timbered country . . I reckon I get a better fracture and rip a little quicker straddling the passes with just the outside hooks. Any temptation to go any deeper in the slot than just the ripper depth must be resisted. The floor should be cleaned off with proper back to front technique . . . this is the cheap dirt . . . and then the floor re-ripped. The wide angle blade excels in these conditions and, to get back to the subject of this thread with the tractor sitting flat and working with full traction on a decent smoothish surface gets maximum life out of the walking gear and the operators back. Cheers.
Yair . . . As a slight aside . . . I wonder how Cat came up with the optimum diameters for the idlers on the Hi-tracks? To me they always look a little on the small side and one would suppose a larger diameter would be a little easier on the chains? Can any of you engineering fellers offer any insights? Cheers.
The stuff you are talking about is utterly foreign to me. We have four varieties of soil; Rock, gravel, mud, and ledge. Ledge aint going to move. Rock, as in home turf is 3' average, that's factoring the sand, and monsters 10 feet and larger. Those more fortunate have either gravel, or mud. These are loose. some is very fine, other ranged to baseball sized. Might a ripper make any difference in this stuff? At home moving soil is exploratory, Dig with excavator until you find a rock small enough to move. Get it out of the way, another smallish one might be loosened, repeat as long as necessary until the real rock is exposed. Once it is on the surface you then decide what to do with it. I can lift 6000, or roll 9000. Beyond that it's call in big machinery, or fire. Typically I either build a waste wood fire, or get out a propane blast torch. In a few hours the 10,000 LB boulder is reduced to pieces.
Yair . . . Gotcha Willie B . Folks have do the best they can in all sorts of different conditions. I was interested to hear how fire can cause your rocks to crack. I have heard of that before but have never seen it done. The local rock here used to be split by drilling a series of holes, filling with water and then driving in tapered softwood plugs. The wood would swell up overnight and crack the rock through straight. Sections of the main street in the village used such split stones for the curbs and edges of the footpath. Our propane here is over a dollar pound so it would be impractical to crack rock I would imagine. Way off topic apologies to O/P. Cheers.
You're right Willie, our UK soil is utterly foreign. Around here much of the land was seabed only a few thousand years ago. We have plenty of limestone, sandstone and shale, but for anything more massive you'd need to travel a bit. Where my house sits, there is a layer of topsoil, then two-three feet of what we call gault clay,then it's either sand/gravel/limestone then blue clay. This clay lays as much as 100 feet thick and the best way to describe it is like blue chewing gum. If the moisture is right, it makes excellent fill, and you can hit compaction by running loaded ADT's over it, if the operators are receptive to the idea of not following each others' wheel marks. If it's too wet, it's useless and you can't do much with it, so dealing with this stuff requires a lot of planning and experience, not to mention good luck with the weather. It's not bad scraper material, and you can make it shine with a dozer or grader. But If you over-cut, it's a bugger trying to put two or three inches back. Ripping slices it into blocks, but won't shatter it.
I'm the OP and more knowledge is gained from hijack, than in all the universities. No problem.
I believe that not the leading edge, but the tail edge of glaciers stopped here to melt away. We got the debris of what the glaciers scuffed off everything north of us. Then recently in the geological sense, floods take, and deliver something new every 50 years. My home is in Brooklyn, a tiny neighborhood named without knowledge of NY NY. Once a steep mountain stream provided water power for 5 mills in 1/2 mile. At intervals averaging 50 years, nature shows engineers they know less than they thought. Truth is, that's a lie. The engineers are half a world away, building a lake for Africans a month away from monsoon season when their whole world will be underwater. Oh well, Engineers are fallible too! I'd be surprised if any of them were ever aware of their failures. In 1927 a flood of biblical proportions destroyed VT, and nearby states. Soon after, engineers from Green Mountain National Forest, and later CCCs "protected" us by moving the stream. This of course began the era of trees growing in a dry stream bed. In 1979 a lesser flood gave us a scare. The stream bed held water. It was a gentle rain, no trees lost their lives. The engineers were alarmed! The problem was obvious: the stream was too close! About a million dollars were spent in 1980 creating a 90 degree turn in the river. They would get it far away from people! A contractor with drills, crane, and the biggest bulldozer I had ever seen spent the summer blasting rock, and moving a river. In August 2011 Hurricane Irene came up the coast. We weren't too concerned, hurricanes are tired by the time they reach VT. This was no exception. Wind was minimal. By 11 Am Sunday, though we knew nothing of it, heavy rains ruptured a beaver dam way up the mountain in wilderness. Water blasted down the small brook to the next dam which I believe offered no deterrent. From there to a third. 200square miles of drainage, combined with three ponds were too much for the meager man made turn in the river. In an instant the old stream bed was once again a raging river. boulders big as a semi truck tumbled through, trees by the thousands blasted along looking for an obstacle to stop it. The log jam accumulated at my property. in five minutes water rose 18 feet in a stream bed always in my memory dry. In my neighborhood millions of cubic feet of earth disappeared. The earth under my barn among it. My frontage on the dry stream bed 300 feet lost 3000 Cubic yards of soil. This is home soil. I relate one storm I witnessed. I'd guess there were many before my time.
Our stones, some variety of granite, are resistant to being cut to square corners as you describe. some have tried without success. They do however shatter by exploiting the property of heat expansion. Truth is inflation factored, fossil fuel is cheaper now, than any time in my life. Still propane for rock breakage is limited to rocks underground, or holding up a big project. If we can get under it, wood is the fuel of choice.