I have a cat d6N LGP and been thinking about buying a winch for it. It has had a winch on it all of its life until about 500 hrs ago they removed it just before i bought it. Id pretty well be winching oilfield equipment and trucks and whatever else would get buried. The machines im going up against in competition are deere 755 and cat 977 with deep grouser. The i guess broker i buy a lot of my equipment from who used to work for cat and also did this kind of work for himself years ago told me the only thing my d6 would winch would be itself. He tells me my 33" pads will pop out when i get a good pull. Will i be able to winch what my competitors can winch or is it a waste of money?
Yair . . . Jasexc If you are just sucking on light stuff obviously the wide grousers could be a disadvantage . . . how much of a disadvantage depends a lot on the dirt. Any decent winch at all will pull even standard locked tracks backwards with little effort. Once you get fair dinkum though you need to dig the b*****d in . . . either spin the tracks against the pull or dig a proper hole and bury it. Once you're set in there and sucking hard it comes down to angles and technique and I don't see why your LGP wouldn't be as effective as any similar tractor . . . and if stuff is bogging all around you it could be handy to have the floatation Cheers
Guess who your competition will be calling when they get mired in..... I live in flat country where a wet hole could be 10 miles across. LGP's are worth the disadvantages here. I've always said it's 90% operator and 10% machine. Twisted
I've always thought of trackloaders as good tail holt's, they sink in good and make great anchors in soft ground. They usually run a narrow two bar grouser, so they have limited flotation and limited traction. Where's the advantage there?
To put things in perspective if you are winching oilfield equipment in or out of locations I would presume that you are already working in muddy conditions, wider pads would definitely be a plus. We run D6Rs in the oilfield in KS outfitted with winches, most of our competitors run 6Ns also outfitted with winches and most of them have no problem handling heavy loads in extremely deep mud. I would agree with scrub puller if your tractor is sliding backwards dig the tracks in, plant your blade down as far as possible. If that doesn't work dig a hole and plant your machine. I've seen 6n's break 1"1/4 cable winching out buried trucks. I definitely wouldn't be afraid of putting a winch on an lgp machine