Old timer told me I was running the cutterhead too fast and burning through teeth in 3 weeks

He said drop the RPMs by 200 and let the material do the work, and now a set of teeth lasts me almost 2 months on the same sandy bottom job out of Mobile Bay, anyone else get that same advice or am I the only one who was overworking it?

3 comments

3 Comments

paul34625d ago

Yeah man, you're not alone. Had a guy on a dredge in the gulf tell me the same thing years ago. I was running the cutterhead wide open like a fool. Dropped it back 250 RPM and suddenly I wasn't changing teeth every other week. It's counterintuitive but the steel just bounces off the sand instead of grinding into it. Saved me a fortune in parts and downtime. Old timers know their stuff.

nelson.nancy24d ago

Heard almost the exact same story from a buddy who works on a dredge up in Alaska. He was all proud of how fast he could spin the cutterhead, thought it was making him look like a hotshot operator. Then the old timer they brought in to train him just laughed and dialed it way back. My buddy said the first week he thought the guy was gonna cost them a ton in production, but by the end of the month they were actually pulling more material with way less wear. The teeth lasted almost three times as long, and the whole rig wasn't shaking itself apart. I guess sometimes you gotta trust the guys who've been doing it since before we were born.

simonb9225d ago

250 RPM sounds like a magic number honestly, maybe we should all just slap a "slow down" sticker on every cutterhead and call it a day.