Excavator 330 C hydraulic system flushing

[Catco]

After hydraulic pump breakdown, metal debris flew all over the hydraulic system of the excavator. now we installed a new hydraulic pump. Hydraulic oil was removed. Hydraulic Tank cleaned. Installed new filters. And filled the tank with new hydraulic oil. We started again the equipment. But its movement was slow. we did find metal debris in some of the valves. Is there a way to flush the hydraulic system and clean it from all the small metal debris to prevent pump failure again. Thanks in advance.

 

[Firemanmike69]

Remove the hoses to the cylinders and drain as much oil as possible.
Remove and reseal the control valve.
Install a flushing filter and flush according to Cat's instructions

 

[Catco]

Can u give me more information about the flushing procedure.. Because I didn't find any procedure on sis. Thanks in advance. Excavator prefix serial number is T2Y

 

[Firemanmike69]

Can u give me more information about the flushing procedure.. Because I didn't find any procedure on sis. Thanks in advance. Excavator prefix serial number is T2Y

No clue about how cat does it, I'm only familiar with Komatsu. Hopefully someone else on here can chime in on how cat does it

 

[big ben]

Depends on how bad it failed and how far metal got but by the sounds of it you have a major failure. If you have metal everywhere there is only one way to properly clean - every cylinder removed and pulled apart, cleaned and resealed. Every hose off and cleaned. Drive and swing motors removed and disassembled and cleaned. Control valve disassembled and cleaned. Oil cooler removed and flushed. Same for swivel.

Who knows how bad it is. Who knows how far the metal is. You can continue to install clean-out filters and cycle components over and over but you risk further damage and strange problem related to metal sticking valves/reliefs for an unknown time period.

Start pulling hoses off cylinders and catch the oil out of the lines and cylinders and see how much metal is where.

No such magic machine that you hook up and it flushes clean oil to everything and removes the metal. Its a long, labor intensive expensive repair for any major pump failure

 

[DoogieB]

If you've run this hydraulic system too long, see above blog message from big ben, but if you catch it in time there may be a quicker way.

Once you have a catastrophic failure and metal is detected in your oil analysis, (please tell me you're doing oil analysis) you must take immediate action. Get a projectile unit such as Ultra Clean Technologies and "pig" all the lines downstream of the pump. Depending on how long and how bad it is , you may have to pig all the lines. This can be an involved project.
Then set-up a kidney-loop using the best filtration possible at the reservoir. Use the filtercart to pump in new oil (or the existing oil as is may be good oil, just full of debris that a good filtercart will stop), let it kidney-loop for an hour or so then slowly begin the process of moving motors and activating the hydraulics (short strokes, small movements) STOP, let the kidney-loop clean what it can for another half-hour or more, repeat. Repeat for about 12 to 36 hours depending on the volume of oil in the system.
We've had great success with a large excavator by removing water-from-oil after the system got contaminated by an attached tool.
Good Luck
Doogie B - Filtramax

 

[Tractorguy]

We had a scrapper put three 15inch sub speaker magnets in the tank without flushing, he didn't want to tear everything down and it's been running for 6 months fingers crossed...