For years I ran my cutterhead at 1200 rpm on sandy bottoms because the manual said it was fine. A job on the Missouri last spring proved me wrong.

3 comments

3 Comments

Man, that's rough. I mean, I had the same thing happen on a river with a lot of gravel. The manual said one thing, but the actual bottom just ate up the teeth. I ended up dropping my speed way down, like to maybe 800 rpm, and it made a huge difference. The wear was way slower and it didn't feel like it was fighting itself as much. Sometimes you just gotta ignore the book and go by what the river tells you.

the_emma1mo ago

Yeah, because the engineers who wrote that manual were definitely out there on your specific stretch of river that day. Manuals give you a safe average, but they don't know if you're digging through soup or concrete. Slowing down to save the machine from eating itself is just basic sense, even if it burns a little extra fuel. Beats replacing a whole set of teeth every other week.

kim.zara1mo ago

But @davis.adam, running that slow can just bog you down and burn more fuel for the same work, right? The manual's specs exist for a reason (they're not just guesses).