You’ve heard them before…, “Bulldozers, Graders, Excavators, Backhoes. Words like these conjure up images of toughness and invincibility…, of endurance and cold hard steel. Without seeing it for yourself, you wouldn’t guess that massive machines would wear away from moving a bit of dirt around. After all, these are the tools that we use to move mountains, dam rivers, and level hundreds of acres at a time, right?

All true, but moving large amounts of material doesn’t mean that there isn’t a cost. Given enough time, even hardened steel wears away. The abrasiveness of that material, whether it’s soft loam, loose sand, or hard rock, will determine the speed at which your blades, buckets, and rakers will erode, but erode they will. Sometimes at an alarming rate, and operation-killing costs.

The way this problem is solved: Before a blade, bucket, tooth, or other object is used for the first time, welders are brought in and they lay down beads of very hard welding rod. These rods are special alloys that contain metals like manganese, molybdenum, and chrome. Each manufacturer makes them with a range of properties, including:

• Hardness (loamy soil only needs resistance to wear. but rocks require resistance to breakage AND wear)
• Strikability from any angle (some rods flow better when welding upside down)
• Penetration (or depth into the base metal)
• Machinability (some hard surfacing needs to be machined, or shaped, after being laid down)
• Slag Peeling (a cost-saving measure – the welding slag doesn’t have to be chipped afterward)
• Pilability (some rods pile high, while others flow out flat against the base metal)

You may have seen hard surfacing before – it’s usually laid down in cross-hatch patterns. However, welding hundreds of yards of rod is tedious, so you sometimes see that more creative welders will make all sorts of patterns and designs, in order to keep their day from getting too boring. The point is to build up the hard surface on all areas that will contact the material and to have it thick enough that it takes the main force of whatever is being pushed, dug, or cut.

How often this needs to be re-done depends on the material being rubbed across the hard surfacing, and the amount of time spent playing in the dirt. In bad conditions, it may need to be done several times a season. One thing is certain though, if a contact surface isn’t hard surfaced, you’ll be buying a new blade, bucket, etc. before very much time has passed.

All of this can be learned at places like ATS Heavy Equipment Training Schools before you ever set foot on a job site.

One of the more onorous jobs of running heavy equipment is keeping them clean. I’m not talking about taking it to the car wash or polishing it up in the driveway. I mean the cleaning that is required to keep the drive train from self-destructing.

It’s not all fun and games out there, folks. There are parts of this world where the dirt you move may turn into the dirt that stops you cold. Like thick Red River gumbo that squeezes into every cavity of your undercarriage, then freezes into something resembling concrete. Even what you thought was friendly loamy soil, coupled with a bit of moisture and a few degrees of frost, can mean the difference between working that day or spending hours and hours chipping away with a pick and shovel.

Conditions like that can turn even a D10 Cat into nothing more than a very large paper weight. That’s not a good thing. In order to avoid that, you need to plan the end of your day as well as you follow your lube procedures. If the crummy is heading down the mountain at five o’clock, then you need to have taken care of anything in your tracks that could stop you from getting going the next day, before it’s time to get on board.

Leave yourself enough time to dig out the mud, or whatever else is in the undercarriage. Anything near the drive train is usually warm enough after a day of running that it can be scraped off or dug out. Whatever is already frozen will still chip off. Believe me, it won’t be like that after a hard night’s freezing though.

When you’re sure there’s not enough crud left in the tracks that can things up, do your end-of-day lube (mor eon that in a later blog), and run the dozer’s tracks up on a fallen log. It makes a world of difference to have some air under a third or more of the track if there’s a hard freeze. Snowmobilers have the luxury of rocking their machines back and forth to break the track free. A Komatsu Komatsu D575A (largest dozer in the world!)…, not so much!