NielV

Hi Everyone.

Greetings from South Africa.

Currently I'm in the industry of repairing, rebuilding and maintaining Heavy Duty Earth moving machinery, and recently we've started up an engineering sector in the company where we do line boring and bucket repairs.

I used to work for Bell Equipment for a number of years as a Technical trainer, of which I would train the technicians on Bell, John Deere, Liebherr and Bomag machines, so obviously you grow to like the brand above others.

After leaving the company and starting up my own, I've learned a lot on other brand machines also. So far, my favorites would still be Bell, but in addition, I've grown to like Hitachi Excavators, ZX670, ZX870, EX1200, Komatsu Excavators, PC850, PC1250, Komatsu Rigid Dump Trucks, HD785's, HD465's, Komatsu Dozers, D155, D275, D375, D475's.

Hope to get to know most of you in the Forum.

Welcome once again. Glad to see ya made it. I see from your resume that you're into big stuff, full blown mining equipment. Good deal. There's tons of advice, opinions and suggestions here. Hope you find it worthwhile to share yours where others could use it.

hello and welcome, Niel. Big iron, we like pictures when you can post them. Those are always fun.

Welcome from BC!

Big iron….nice!

Thanks for the warm welcome.

I have some pictures of Hydraulic flushes we did recently...

Lots of armouring on that bucket!

BC Placer gold said:

Lots of armouring on that bucket!

Click to expand...

With the Hard Rock Mining (Chrome and Platinum) where we are, the buckets are quite protected.

what is dangling on the hook in that pic?

skyking1 said:

what is dangling on the hook in that pic?

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Thats the main valve bank. We were busy removing it for repairs.

We had a hydraulic hose and hydraulic pump failure on the machine, and debris entered the valve bank, seizing some of the spools. Had to change out a whole segment of the valve bank due to the damage it had.

I thought so Niel. That is very cool there is a ton of capped off hoses in there we can't see

How you like working with a knuckle boom as opposed to a tele boom?

skyking1 said:

I thought so Niel. That is very cool there is a ton of capped off hoses in there we can't see

Click to expand...

True that. We had to replace about a third of the machines hoses, and still we had aeration problems after the flush.

Very important to change all the return line o-rings and gaskets too. Thats where the aeration was originating from, and also some return hoses.

We removed avery last hydraulic component from the machine, cleaned, repaired and resealed it all, and replaced it back in the machine.

Started it up around 2 weeks after the initial failure.

Was a nice project, but glad it's over though.

That sounds like a hellish mess. Huge system and lots of places for junk to go hide.