My old foreman told me to always run the cutter head at full speed in dense clay. I did it for years until a pump failure on the Willamette job showed me why he was wrong.

3 comments

3 Comments

Come on... a pump failure is just bad luck. That stuff happens no matter how you run the machine. I doubt running it slower would have made any real difference.

river32015d ago

Yeah, the "bad luck" thing is what my buddy thought too. He ran his industrial washer flat out for months, said the same stuff happens anyway. Then his pump blew on a Tuesday, cost him four grand and a week of downtime. The repair guy said the constant high RPMs wore the bearing out way faster than normal. Now he runs it slower on heavy loads and hasn't had a problem in two years.

sean_torres7115d ago

Man, that "bad luck" idea is how you go broke. It's not magic, it's physics. Run ANYTHING at its max speed all day and the parts just cook themselves. Think about your car, you don't drive it in the red zone on the highway for months. Same with a pump bearing, the heat and stress from high RPMs turns a ten-year part into a one-year part. The failure might feel random, but the wear that caused it sure wasn't.

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