I was curious how well wheel loaders work on sandy surfaces? Not bottomless sand but soft enough to leave ruts.
They work just fine if you know how to. Time gives the knowledge and water is your friend so rainy days are good days. Worked a sand screen plant running a 950 Cat loader with nearly 1/4 mile lead now worries. Years before that I worked on a subdivision doing earthworks in sand dunes sitting on a AC 545 and out pushed a HD6.
Tyre pressure and regular monitoring of it are the winner
Thanks for the replies. I'm thinking a wheel loader might be a better machine than a grader for building and maintaining a sandy MX track. I want to limit how much I use my track loader in sand.
Stay away from sugar sand if its dry, damn that stuff sucks. I found a couple wild deposits and they want to swallow everything, you can roll over it but if you're applying power to scoop it just goes wrong. How big of an MX track? Whereas you're in a fixed location doing one kind of job you could run the tires at a slightly lower pressure to cut down the ground pressure. We run the michelin xtla tires and they work well, 30 front 25 rear for general (light) use. If we're doing heavy work, we will bump it up to 50 front 40 rear. Rides better at the lower pressure for scraping a little dirt or spreading road material, figure softer ride is softer on the axles, pivots etc.
I know some sand is like quick sand. The track will be over about 25-30 acres but I could take material from the rest of the quarter section. I hope to use the dump truck to at least get material closer to the track but need something that will work in a moderate amount of sand. Don't want to have to use the track loader too much if I can help it. It's good for loading the dump truck or working on jumps made out of dirt and clay. The backhoe is good for digging material.
what did you find, a nice small Cat 990 that someone traded for a welding job?
No, I was thinking something in the 2 1/4-3yd. size. I saw a couple old (72/73) Cat 966C's around $30Kcad. but think that's too much for 50+ year old loader. I saw a couple Daewoo/Doosan Mega 200's. A 2002 for $42K with under $4K hours but it was repainted and showed signs of rust. It seemed low for the hours so I thought maybe it was used a lot in salt or something and the paint was covering up some bad issues. The other was a 1995 with 8700 hours for $29K. I think it came from a municipality. Pretty clean looking with good tires and original paint. The place selling it is the same place I bought my welder and had applied for a job way back. The guy was really straight up. I didn't get the job because he hired a guy with dual HD mechanic and welding tickets. The welder used to belong to him but they built their own service truck so didn't need it anymore. It's a 1961 SA200 so is very desirable. It wasn't running and cost about $800 for a new carb. and to rebuild the magneto. He told me I didn't have to buy it if it was going to cost too much to fix. When I told him it cost $800 to fix he gave me $100 back because it was more than he figured it would cost. I got it for $500 and bought some used cables from Red-D-Arc for another $200. I know Cat will have good parts support for older machines but for a loader that will only get a couple hundred hours a year other than the initial building is it worth looking at much newer loaders like Daewoo/Doosan? They get pretty good reviews and from what I can find have decent parts support.
You should be able to find some newer, 1990's machines reasonably prices, picked up a 644e, larger than I was looking for, 15k ran and operated but had solid tires and needed center pivot rebuilt and needed an engine refresh. Was looking at 444/544 but 644 was a good price
Welded with an SA200 once, what an experience.
One thing not a wheel loaders favour when working in sand will be a higher fuel burn, where ever they go on site it's like driving up hill to some extent.