Dozer Blade Tilt Cylinder Protection

Working on a "cigarete packet" sketch to give to the welders as we speak. Availability of materials should not be a problem, I just need to find some pipe the correct diameter with a thick enough wall.

Yair...Nige. 2U with a string blade and donkey start? Fair enough point taken. I reckon the heavy wall tube idea could work.
HOWEVER. There is a possibility that out there somewhere is scientificaly designed gooley of the correct dimensions that some manages to lodge in between the pipe and the rod for a few strokes. Just a thought.

Your split pipe idea though jogged the memory bank and I seem to remember a tractor with a piece of heavy (say) sixteen inch tube split and welded to the back of the blade and gusseted onto the hungry board that you have already fitted.

I have spent a lot of time devising gaurds and shielding to keep sticks out of tractors (and operators) vital bits and some times there are unintended consiquences to what seems a good idea. Interesting thread.

Cheers

Good point. Honestly up to a point I'm glad that we just work in rock and so I don't have to cope with the difficulties of pioneering, etc. I'd be ecstatic if the idea I've had worked first time out, but I'm enough of a realist to accept it if it doesn't and try something else. TBH I'm not discounting ANY of the suggestions that people have come up with so far.

The for the "split pipe" idea I'm only going to use half of it, the bottom will be totally open. Hopefully the goolies (not heard that word for a while) will fall out of the bottom.

I will make sure to let people know how this goes and post pictures of whatever we finally come up with that works.

We'd like to see the ideas that don't work too!

What about a section of old truck tyre or something similar bolted to the blade end and long enough to slide up and down the hyd cyl as it moves, conveyor belt could be a possibility. Cheers RDG.

We have topcon gps on 2 of are 8T's and we keep breaking poles because of rocks coming up and over, we going to order a few rock guards and do some fabricating and see how that works, those poles are $2000 a pop and we have 400 acres that has to be toped with 2ft of shot rock.

Vapor300
If the operator is not savvy enough to keep the rocks out of the GPS poles, I would send them packing. There is no excuse for that.

On the guarding issue, I would stay away from the spring idea. It would allow smallish rocks to get in when axpanded, then when compressed, trap them in there to have their way with the rod untill the spring opened enough or they were ground up (against the "protected" cylinder rod) enough to fall out.

Likewise with the pipe idea, or even the half pipe. If your protection is very close to the cylinder, it serves as a trap to hold rock against what you are trying to protect. That is why the guard in my picture is well away from the cylinder. It protects the rod from the big ones, and does not leave much of a way to trap a small or mid sized one in there. It still gets some rock stuck, but USUALLY not where it is against the rod.

I have worked rock and quarrying for many years, and if there was an easy way to protect that rod, I an pretty sure Cat would have it fitted by now, or if not them, then some of the bigger mining customers. Most of the obvious looking "protection" ideas end up doing more harm than good.

JDOFMEMI said:

Vapor300
If the operator is not savvy enough to keep the rocks out of the GPS poles, I would send them packing. There is no excuse for that.

Click to expand...

I thoughts exactly. If you can't keep rocks off the GPS poles you aren't much of operator. How do they treat the rest of the machine?