you know new models use hydraulics for doing this, but what about this, what kind of thing is this, and how it works?
wow that rig looks weird.... something for moving your circle out?? the blade lift cylinders look awful short on that too...
Thats a 12F grader, we've got one left and had 2 at one time. Thats just how they raise the blade. The lever turns this pump which in returns turns this long driveshaft to the front of the lift pump (the front thing) and which it rotates the long thick 5-6" shaft which moves that back arm from like 12 - 6. The lift arms have pins in which you have to drive a pin out and move the arm up and down. This is back before the G's full hydraulic cylinders were introduced.
excuse me, i did not tell, this is a big one, 16, a similar to 12F i think, and it is normal to confuse about model because no way to compare to anything in my pic, sorry, now i am telling, a 1968 model caterpillar 16.
Is that a recent photo? If it is that blade has had fine care.
Damn I should have looked at the twin air breathers How big of a motor is in that beast?! Here's a pic of our F we just painted when it was not fully decaled, so you can easily see how I called it a 12F Ours is either a 77 or 78, I can't quite remember.
Are you forgetin' stuff again Chris??? You do that at work, ya ain't allowed to do it at home! :lmao :falldownlaugh
I was just focused on the red rectangle. My parents always said keep your eye on the prize, so i was focused like a hawk On top of forgetting stuff I do need to be more observant at times :Banghead
is that a hydraulic pump, in the front?
I believe it to be gear driven since the whole machine works is basically driven by driveshafts.
I'm not a grader person, never had the opportunity to work on one, but I've always been curious about them. I remember these old "mechanical graders" as a youngster, watching all the shafts turn. My question; when you operate a lever, does the lever engage some sort of clutch from the power source to drive the function/shaft selected? And, do you feather it, or just stab it in?
I've never really ran the F, only moved it around on the lot a handfull of times. I started out on my G but I can tell you this, I noticed that the controls are a lot slower so i would imagine that no stabbing will be needed. You can wind the motor up real good and hit the leavers and it moves real slow and real smooth. I would imagine its a dream for fine grading a road! My brother started out on it and he would always say how great it was for fine grading for that reason, and the fact that you could always tell how much fall you put in the road by the position of those two arms that move the blade up and down as long as you had the pins in the same slot on each side. But to answer your question to the best of my knowledge Atco, I would say that the 12F's didn't have any clutches. That they have a hydraulic piston that the lever moves that lets hyd oil flow through each port to move turn the yoke that turns the driveshaft to each gear driven motor. There are only 2 cylinders on the machine other than the steering and tilt. Thats to move the blade in and out, and the ripper. Hope this helps answer any questions, I can get you some more detailed pics if you wish.
If you are talking about just the old mechanical graders,the early Cat graders at least,there is no feathering of their controls,they are all mechanical and the gears are either meshed or unmeshed,kind of like a boat lower unit,the water is the clutch. In the case of the grader unless you are at the end of travel of the gearbox there is minimal load on the gearshaft and because of the gear reduction between drive and driven it works pretty good generally.It sometimes fights back but I think that there are wear adjustments to compensate for it. The Cat 12 was one of the graders at Ft Leonard Wood training school when I was in the army.Everything that I have run since was hydraulic though.Ron G
We still have our 12 grader a 99E model from 1960 and it still does a job or two every year. There is definitely no feathering. There are a series of "dog clutches" that look somewhat like the engagement clutches in a Roadranger gearbox, that is with teeth, no slippage. The teeth are also sloped so that when a high load is placed on them such as reaching the end of travel or a hard cut with the blade the levers will pop out with great force to avoid damage. Damage to the operator was secondary consideration! On a side note, I've had a number of people grease our 12 including a couple experienced grader operators and I've always found grease fittings they missed - 84 by count.
Chris, nice looking F model there. But I would venture a guess to say that its a 73 or older, as Cat didnt make any to my knowledge after that.
I'm not to familiar with the machine, so the year was a little fuzzy as you can tell My biggest tie to the machine is I sanded and painted it :cool2 I really don't want any ties to it after running my G for a while. I'll ask my dad or brother today exactly what year it is, I know its one of the last years they made the F's so it very well could possibly be a 73.
Ive found out the hard way why they called them a knuckle buster. I ran one for a man on his farm one time when I was between jobs. They was a hunk of lime rock that was up through the road and I hit it while grading and I was applying down pressure. That thing kicked out and jarred my whole hand. My wrist swole up like a grapefruit. The scarifier also ran off this method to. I ve seen a large Caterpillar pull type that had sollid steel wheels that had a pony motor on it and ran a chain drive to a gear box that was set up all the blade hitch and wheel lean and side shift was run like this.
I operated my first 12F grader in 1969, the grader was a 1968 model. Earlier models such as the 12E 99E were a little harder on the operator as you had to essentially jam one gear into another to raise or lower the moldboard. Old operators to this day wear gloves because they dampened the impact somewhat. The more pressure you put on the moldboard, the harder the controls kicked. The 12F was kind of a blessing as the lift mechanism was hydraulically assisted. You could hear the clicking of the gears inside the control box but it wouldn't kick the operator. They still had a shear pin like the older graders to protect the gears. In the day they were pretty nice graders and both older machines, (F's or E's) were much nicer to finish grade with than any of their contemporaries.
Welcome to HEF tripper 174 :drinkup Nice to see another Grader Operator join up! Canadian as well...eh?
thanks! Thanks Grader4me. Appreciate the welcome and am looking forward to learning lots here. And yep, a Canuck!
No hyd on that all gears
Not a hydraulic cylinder per se other than the wheel lean. However it was oil assisted. I think I can find the manual and if so I'll try to show the system here provided I can scan it and upload it.
That is a nice looking old 16, even if the front tires are mounted backwards They were Hydraulic over mechanical, similar to the 12F No, you could not feather them, but they wouldn't kick back like a full mechanical motor grader BTW, a straight frame 16 could out do a 16G in heavy work
I was curious if anyone knew the engine size on that 16F pictured initially?
My Cat handbook says it is 225 H.P. but doesn't tell me anything else about it.
If I recall correctly it is a D343
Have any of you blokes known the joy of plowing snow with one of those Barny Rubble knuckle buster 12's. There wasn't any auxiliary hydraulic power to run a wing so what to do? A double ended winch was mounted on the right side just in front of the cab. I think it was the drawbar side shift drive shaft that was disconnected and used to drive the winch. A shift lever stuck though the front of the cab so you could select left or right drum on the winch. Two cables from the drums went out to lift the front and rear of the wing. Upon coming up to a fence post or any other obstacle you would use the winch to slowly lift up one end of the wing, shift the winch over to the other drum and slowly lift the other end of the wing, then move ahead and reverse the process. What joy. How can you tell I'm not one of those who have CAT tattooed on his butt.
The old cat blades used beveled gears to operate the blade, circle etc. and there was single shaft off engine it had a couplelin with a shear pin to protect the gears and operator,but someone would put 5/16th" bolt when the pin would and the operator would get kicked like mule
The first cat grader I ever plowed snow with was set up the same way. You realy had to be on your toes around mail boxes.Heck of an education for a sixteen year old kid.But after that its all downhill.
I seem to remember looking at a Caterpillar Performance Handbook from the late '80's or early '90's, and they showed two or three Brazilian-sourced machines that were still rigid frame machines. I can't remember what models they were, but think they were probably 120/140 sized machines. Didn't pay much attention to the specs, so I don't know if they were all mechanical, or 12F style w/hydraulic motors driving the gear boxes. Basic machines to meet basic needs. Not Barney Rubble, but not George Jetson either. smoothoperator...keeping moldboards shiny for 29 years
Tidy 16 When I owned my first grader (12E 17K) I was told only ever use a "rollpin" as a replacement in the dog clutches, never a bolt (they don't shear as easy) or you'll be sorry Back to the pic of the rigid 16, 14E's were a similar set up with 17.5 x 25 tyres & about 200hp. Full noise to make things work too
Is this the "knuckle buster" era or was that before this one.
These are the ones (dog clutches) that are being referred too