Caterpillar Performance Handbook

[Matt McGowan]

Does anyone know for sure if the latesest handbook has production rates for dozers and pans that are running on a GPS based automated blade control system? At a minimum I would hope that they would have some modifier ratios.

I presently have the 31st edition and it does not address it. The copywright date is October of 2000.

Thanks for your help.
Matt

 

[JDOFMEMI]

I do not have the latest one, but i doubt it is in there. GPS is not going to increase machine production, but it will have an impact on job efficiency by getting to the proper grade without as much supporting equipment and grade checkers. The machines still haul the same amount, just get it right faster.

 

[rino1494]

Do the newer editions cover the older machines too ??

 

[fensoncont.]

The Caterpilllar Performance Handbook Edition 36 does have info on former models.

The book has a section on Laser Systems and it does show examples of saving money, but nothing with production rates with them or efficiency factors with them. Unless I am missing something in the book.

Hope this helps.

 

[TRACKHOE71]

hey nolan where can i get a performance handbood and what do they cost? thanks. jordan

 

[fensoncont.]

My dad got mine from Cat for me for christmas and he didnt pay a dime. Try eBay, or your Cat Dealer. The Cat Dealer said they dont pass them out to just anybody. But I'm sure they would be lenient.

 

[Matt McGowan]

Thanks for the replies guys. They are much appreciated.

I agree that with automated machine control you are not going to get any piece of equipment to push more dirt than it is physically capable of pushing before it had machine control. You are going to get to grade quicker, and in my mind, that has a tangible value.

Fensoncont.,

Could you check and see what the copyright date is on your handbook? Also, do they just talk about laser grade control or do they include GPS as well?

Thanks
Matt

 

[fensoncont.]

Matt,
The copyright as I understand it is April 2006.

Yes, they have a section that is about 1 page long on AccuGrade GPS Grade Control.

 

[JDK40]

I recently got a copy of Edition 38 (2008) but it doesn't have the info I'm looking for, so possibly someone can help me out.

I need some specs on a CAT 245, 245B, or 245D, specifically the curling and crowd forces. If anyone has an older edition that has this info in it, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

 

[surfer-joe]

A contractor I recently worked for here was using GPS for grade control. They had GPS receivers mounted in three Cat 160 blades and three dozers, two D9's and a D6.

I'm a bit long in the tooth for this computer aided stuff, but I was picking it up. Here is what I learned;

1. The state doesn't give the contractor a "final" GPS program for design and grade initially.

2. The state engineers constantly change the program perameters.

3. The state has to comply with the design demands of other agencies like the Forest Service, the BLM, federal DOT, the Park Service, and many others.

4. These demands sometimes change daily.

5. Designs change often because of real world conditions encountered such as soil types, unexpected rock or water, etc. Discovery of an endangered species within the ROW always neccesitates a change.

6. Without a final program, the contractor takes a huge (and expensive) risk moving any dirt at all. Even the ROW can change from one software disc to another.

7. All GPS receivers do not interpet the GPS signal and execute it the same way. This can mean that three machines may be off from each other on the same grade point by several inches or even feet.

8. GPS receivers and senders often go down with warning, leaving you sitting in your bulldozer scratching yourself without a clue as to where grade is.

9. GPS requires a well trained and experienced technician to set up, adjust, and repair. Every job ought to have one. Most do not.

10. You have to keep the GPS equipment in good condition at all times. DO NOT DROP!

11. GPS takes a decent battery or a good electrical source to operate correctly. Make sure you charge the batteries nightly.

12. Have spare batteries charged up and ready to go, several of them.

GPS equipment has to be secured every night and during other periods of inactivity. Well secured. A Conex box out in the boondocks with a big padlock is NOT well secured over a long holiday. This contractor found this out the hard way over Christmas this season when they went back to work on January 2nd and found the Conex door swinging gently in the breeze, and all the GPS equipment gone -- missing -- stolen.

So the company bought all new GPS equipment, a half million bucks worth. Guess what? The new GPS stuff shows every grade on the project to be off, considerably. All the culverts are in the wrong place. The overpass footings and piers are in the wrong place -- all this according to the new equipment. The fellas are trying to get the new stuff to agree with the old dimensions but I understand it's a slow and frustrating process. Move one grade and everything else has to move accordingly.

We are talking about a job that has a third of the dirt already moved and many slopes already bought by the state.

Now I know that the old wood stakes were a bothersome thing, though good for a stakekiller like me. But a good crew of surveyors or a grade-checker can put a stake-line back up pretty quickly. Surely for a lot less than half a million bucks. Not too many people steal grade-stakes or pegs either.

So, forgive me if I seem somewhat dubious about the advantages of GPS.

 

[RonG]

You are my new hero,Surfer Joe!!
I had to retire about the time this GPS thing was getting a grip on the industry so I never got to use it.Since I need glasses to read anything closer than arms length I often wonder how "user friendly" that system would be to me.
There is no doubt that it could be the greatest thing ever used the way it is sold if it works the way it was sold but hearing what you have just posted puts another face on things and I am just old and cynical enough to buy into those arguements and want to say "I told you so!".
There is no doubt that the technology will prevail and we need to accept the challenge of learning "something new" to stay current in the industry or we have to move on.
The electronics on the new machines and engine controls are an example,they are a fact of life.Yes,they eliminate some jobs but they create new ones so as with most anything else in life,we must keep an open mind and continue to learn.
I agree that the laser was a great tool but it has its place.Laying pipe is where it really "shines".LOL.
It can be used to great advantage when you are working alone but given the choice I often choose a Locke level and a folding rule.Sometimes a string line and a line level will get the job done faster than the laser with less baggage as well.
I must admit though that being able to carry a grade accurately while sitting in the cab without having to dismount sounds pretty good to an old bird like me and I really would like to give it a shot.Trouble is,noone wants an old man around these days.The kids run you off after they see the work that you can do 'cause you make them look bad.Life goes on.Ron G

 

[Ray Welsh]

You are my new hero,Surfer Joe!!
I had to retire about the time this GPS thing was getting a grip on the industry so I never got to use it.Since I need glasses to read anything closer than arms length I often wonder how "user friendly" that system would be to me.
There is no doubt that it could be the greatest thing ever used the way it is sold if it works the way it was sold but hearing what you have just posted puts another face on things and I am just old and cynical enough to buy into those arguements and want to say "I told you so!".
There is no doubt that the technology will prevail and we need to accept the challenge of learning "something new" to stay current in the industry or we have to move on.
The electronics on the new machines and engine controls are an example,they are a fact of life.Yes,they eliminate some jobs but they create new ones so as with most anything else in life,we must keep an open mind and continue to learn.
I agree that the laser was a great tool but it has its place.Laying pipe is where it really "shines".LOL.
It can be used to great advantage when you are working alone but given the choice I often choose a Locke level and a folding rule.Sometimes a string line and a line level will get the job done faster than the laser with less baggage as well.
I must admit though that being able to carry a grade accurately while sitting in the cab without having to dismount sounds pretty good to an old bird like me and I really would like to give it a shot.Trouble is,noone wants an old man around these days.The kids run you off after they see the work that you can do 'cause you make them look bad.Life goes on.Ron G

I used multi grade laser indicators on my D7 back in 1981. My machine was on hire to a contractor who graded the runway of the new Brisbane airport. Sand had been pumped to a 5metre overfill and left for years to preload the runway. The bulk was pushed out into the surrounding swamp by a couple of HD-41s and I followed behind them trimming to grade.
This was latest technology of the time and all I had to do was stay within the pegged boundaries for the day. Blade control was manual by watching flashing green, orange and red lights in your peripheral vision. The mast containing the receiver was set higher than the cab, so I could work in any direction. The laser sender was mounted on a trailer with a telescoping boom.
Each morning, the surveyor would set it up for level and grade, show me which paddock to stay inside, then dissappear for the rest of the day.
Following me was a 6WD John Deere grader trimming the last assisted by an elevating scraper to remove his windrows.
All in all the job was done and the runway was in the right place.
The above stories about large mistakes by GPS are a frightening thought to me. It wouldn't cost too much for a surveyor on the ground to do the occasional check from known reference points!!.......C ya...........Ray

 

[surfer-joe]

Even surveyors can be off by quite a bit. Years ago a contractor I was working for was building an overpass on some interstate near Beaver, West Virginia. They was working from both side and when it came time to put the last bridging beams on the piers it was discovered that the center was 6 inches off.

One side or the other had to come out and be relocated and I never did hear which side they chose. The outfit did lose some money on that job.

We had a drunk for a surveyor on the job in southern Maryland and he was mucking up all over the place. The General Super was a buddy of his and wouldn't fire him so the dirt bosses got together and ran their own grades with eye levels from the hubs the state ran in. We finally got rid of the General Supt and that surveyor and had some surveyors come down from another project in Pennsylvania for a few days to check things out before we started the sub base gravel. Just about everything was where it was supposed to be. We hired a contract survey crew for the finish work out of Annapolis and they did good. We made a little money there and got a tiny bonus.

I haven't any experience with the lasers at all tho have seen several setups using them. Most popular seemed to be a smaller area where the equipment could stay in line of sight, mostly tractors with a double pull-pan get-up. Some of the land leveling contractors in California use them in their fields with huge land planes. The one contractor I worked for here two years ago used one for finish grade on housing lots with a D8N. Each lot had to be set up individually. As I recall, the operator used that green light/red light to set the blade with.

 

[928G Boy]

I agree, the GPS systems can be a real PITA, I worked with an accugrade system lots this past summer with a 140H, but if one machine is a foot off from another... I have to say it's not GPS's fault... There's something extremely mucked up with the setup... A foot is huge. A couple inches maybe...

All in all, I find the job can be more stressful with GPS. If you're working on a road restoration and there are some big trees along the sides of the road... Well right there you've got a problem with reception whenever you get near those trees.

Battery goes dead on the base station even after you charged it the night before? Been there done that. Almost got into a fistfight with a foreman over that one.

I found for whatever reason that even with a big $500 anntenna I bought from Cat, I couldn't get a solid signal in the 140H from about 1/2 a mile away from the base station. Caterpillar service won't help me out, nobody around here from the local cat dealer knows jack about this stuff.

Some days there's solar flares and you lose everything, GPS goes down and you're out of luck... And then everybody looks at me like I broke the thing or something... yep, I have lots of fun with GPS!

 

[JDOFMEMI]

I recently got a copy of Edition 38 (2008) but it doesn't have the info I'm looking for, so possibly someone can help me out.

I need some specs on a CAT 245, 245B, or 245D, specifically the curling and crowd forces. If anyone has an older edition that has this info in it, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

It took me a while to be able to answer this, but in my 14th edition handbook, from 1983, the bucket curl for a 245 is 56,462 with a short radius bucket, and 54,446 with a long radius bucket.
Stick crowd is 57,883 with short stick, 51,268 with med stick, and 41,857 with a long stick.

Hope this helps

 

[dirthog27]

Lost Art?

Im sorry, but to me GPS is the downfall of our profession! True, it can increase productivity, but these younger hands have NO idea how to read stakes and even come close to building a job on their own. Give them a rel cloudy day and they are screwed. I agree that gps is a help, but teach the younger generation how to build a job from the ground up, WITH THEIR PIECE OF EQUIPMENT, and the let them play computer games!

 

[fensoncont.]

I noticed the curl and crowd information in my book and was trying to figure out what it all meant. From what I understand it deals with digging into a material that has a _____ density, so it will show whether or not you will be able to get heaping buckets digging into it? Where do these calculations and such come from, I would like to incorporate this into my estimating.

 

[xcavate77]

i guess ill be the one who sees advantages to using GPS. dirthog, clouds have no effect on GPS at all, the satellites and recievers are not influenced by any sky cover even rain. 928, you are right about it not being the GPS fault, if it is not set up correctly, which becomes very easy after a little use, it will be off proportionally to the amount of error entered, the same as if you were to read a wood rule wrong or did your math incorrectally reading hubs. Also the tree thing is a factor but it kind of depends on the system you are using, some brands have more satellites available = more coverage less if any downtime and new systems have hot swapable batteries that you can even run on AA's, base station to machine communication has nothing to do with atmosphere, it is radio based much like a CB radio, if it wasn't communicating with the base it was most likely something to do with interference and needed the channel changed, Joe, you seem to be very knowledgeable on several subjects that ive seen around here, the only argument i have is that if the GPS goes down you can still do rough cut and fill or other tasks. If the machine goes down (which is just a tool like GPS) then you are really sitting around. We have had more errors by surveyors than by our GPS but we have had substantial training. Most companies do not train their people properly due to the fact that their dealer support is sub par. If we never had anyone show us how to run the iron it would have taken alot longer to master that too. RonG, any "kids who run off old men" are fools and had best learn, there is no better person to learn from than the one whos done it for a while, I am 29 and never miss an opportunity to learn from those who came before me. Bottom line, it will never replace a good hand but sure is a nice tool when used properly. Again thanks for everyones knowledge I really enjoy the conversations here

 

[ibilge]

ı need caterpillar performance book 38 can you have :$

 

[dumpchuck]

Cat performance handbook 39 has a 15 page section on technology products including Accugrade, CAES, AQUILA dril system and dragline system, MINESTAR, and VIMS. There is nothing specific regarding dozers and pans. They do have a page on savings using laser grade control systems vs conventional staking methods.