mancavedweller
Active Member
I've got exactly the same disease. I seem to have a hopeless need to fix up machinery.
And the way you often have to pay for complete OEM parts, e.g. one of my excavator final drives went, so I stripped it down and found the central shafts in the planetary gear set had worn/bust male & female splines. So I call the dealer to find they only sell complete final drives at $4000 each. Contacted Bonfiglioli but they said they can't sell parts to me because the final drive has an OEM part number. To make matter worse I figured I need 2 new final drives because if one has worn out then the other one won't be far off failing (had the machine since new). This was for a 1.7 ton excavator and I was just an hourly hire contractor. I was ready to dump the business if I had to pay $8000 just to fix the final drives. Luckily I found an aftermarket parts supplier for final drives in the UK. They gave me the contact of a guy in Australia, who ended up ordering the parts out of Japan.
Had the same issue with the boom ram on the excavator. The chrome rod had snapped when the auger locked up between a couple of big rocks. Again they told me they could only supply a full ram, and it had to come out of the US (so latest model machine but no spare rams here). Would have cost me something like $1500. So I went and bought some chrome bar and machined up my own replacement hydraulic rod on the lathe. Maybe $50 in material for the repair.
Then an old lady drove in front of me on a main road. Truck written off and excavator slew ring and slew motor stuffed up. Went into the dealer for repairs and it was there 6 weeks because they said they didn't have spare parts anywhere in the world (honestly that's what they told me, in such a casual way). After a lot of screaming at the manager down the phone, he got the techs to pull parts off a new machine (but tried to charge me an extra $400 for that, more screaming ensued). That "repair" cost $9500 but lasted only a few weeks before the slew ring and slew motor pinion bust themselves up because the slew motor bolts had came loose and the rocking caused the gear teeth to start chipping and mixing in with the grease. Dealer would not admit any fault so I bought another slew ring, and got a gear manufacturer to machine a new pinion for the slew motor, and did the repair again all by myself in my back yard. Took me 4 days. The repair lasted 7 years of hard use until the slew ring & pinion wore out, then I replaced them again. During the repair I noticed the slew ring had the mounting holes in offset locations. No doubt this is so the slew ring cannot be rotated every so often, and thus the most used group of the teeth will wear out while the rest are hardly worn.
I vowed that if I ever design or rebuild a machine, I'll be using off the shelf hydraulic parts, etc, with standard mounts, and internal spares available. No more of this OEM, suck you dry crap. I learned the hard way why many guys buy a new machine, use it for so long then trade in and get another new machine. Definitely seems a way to go if you have regular business.
