JDcrawlers Messageboard

Pop Pop I think you might be getting Drawbar HP and Drawbar Pull mixed up, the two are two completely unrelated things. There was a very brief period of time when steam tractors were rated in real world horse power; that is when they said it was 8 horse power, it LITERALLY could do the work of an 8 ...

That is interesting, but I am unsure of how they generated their percentages. In accounting there is a saying that "there is nothing simple about percentages", and it is true! What they are really giving you over the PA system is (or should be) drawbar pull , which is hard to calculate outside of co...

Yeah it did not make sense to me either. On my own dozer, I actually limit my reverse travel on account of wear. I read somewhere (Dresser I think) that traveling in reverse a lot puts a unique wear pattern on the sprockets. High speed reverse is even worse to which they even have a special name for...

It took us three hours but on Thursday we got the track back on. It was not as bad as the first time surprisingly considering the mountain we were on and the spot it was sitting in. That was better than the Hitachi 160 Excavator, on Saturday I lost a track on that and ended up spending 5 hours getti...

I have never heard of this before, but the owner of an Excavator I was using (Hitachi 160 (34,000 pound class), chided me for traveling the excavator "backwards", that is having the sprockets forward. He said doing so would "throw a track". Now I know traveling in reverse on a dozer increases wear a...

With a lathe you know it is easy to over-turn anything in the round because when you make a cut on one side, you really are making a cut on the other side as well since the stock is turning. Well it works the same way when filling something. Your pins do not look that bad to me. Yes they are egged o...

Sorry guys for that... But it doesn't really matter, we are broke down again. Maybe there is something for sticking with the old tried and true John Deere equipment after all and not the newer stuff. You know it is a VERY bad thing when you are operating a bulldozer on top of a mountain (at the furt...

Well we got the dozer back up and running! Putting the new disc back on was not that bad, but getting the track back together sure was. It took an excavator pulling on the track, two ratchet straps and a few lining bars, but we got the track on and the dozer did well. After all was said and done I h...

I have been busy stumping a new pasture at a camp where I volunteer. First it was with a Hitachi zx160lc excavator, but now they got a new operator running that while I work my magic with a John Deere 700G. Boy what a nice tractor ; or at least it was until I shattered the right rear sprocket. I wil...

Here fuel oil is a HUGE commodity because so many do heat with oil. Price wise it is cheaper than off-road fuel and way cheaper than on-road fuel obviously. A lot of that is due to taxes. In Maine any fuel used to heat a residence is non-taxable. I ran into this a few times when I noticed tax placed...

Okay, now this is all well and good, but what about us guys that run #2 heating oil for our tractors? I go to church with a guy that works for the oil company and he told me On-Road diesel is 15 ppm in sulfur, off-road diesel is 500 ppm in sulfur, but heating oil is 1000 ppm in sulfur. I am thinking...

I am not sure you would honestly want to even if you could do so easily. I had this kind of set-up for awhile while I waited for my grapple trailer to have its powerpack come in. What I immediately noticed was a lot of fuel consumption and A LOT of extra hours on my tractor for no really good reason...

It is a little different in Moldova in that they are such a young country. Most families there have not farmed the same land for generations like they do here in the USA or in Europe, but only in the last 20 years or so. Even their family trees can only be traced back as far as their grandparents, a...

I have operated some interesting stuff; skidders, bulldozers and locomotives, but today was a first in that I drove a combination of all three; a 1900-1917 Lombard Log Hauler. We went to the Maine Logging Museum today and at noon they brought out one of the 83 steam Lombard log haulers that Alvin Lo...

That is really nice! I love two things: (1) smaller equipment used to do big projects. I say that because it is easy to overbuild something and overspend doing it, but to make something that is small, works well and can be done by many landowners is awesome. (2) Homemade projects that look professio...