Shoutout to the guy who convinced me to swap my cutterhead teeth early

I was always the type to run cutterhead teeth until they basically fell off. Figured I was saving money by squeezing every hour out of them. Then this old timer at the Port of Baltimore told me I was wasting fuel and wearing down my ladder bearings faster. He showed me his production logs, he changed teeth at 80% wear and his cycle times were 15% faster. I tried it on my next job near Norfolk and sure enough my fuel gauge barely moved. Has anyone else seen a big difference switching teeth sooner?

2 comments

2 Comments

simonbell20d ago

Oh wow, that's a really good point! I gotta gently push back on that 80% number though. Running them until 80% worn is definitely way better than running them to nothing, but from what I've seen the real sweet spot is more like 60-70% if you're really trying to dial in fuel savings. The tooth geometry changes more than you think once you hit that 70% mark, and it starts dragging instead of cutting clean. Plus the bearing wear thing is real, I talked to a LSI engineer once who said most of the premature ladder bearing failures he saw came from people running dull teeth too long. So you're on the right track for sure, just might be leaving a little bit on the table.

cameron76320d ago

...yeah I'm gonna have to disagree a bit here. That 60-70% sweet spot sounds good on paper but in practice you're swapping teeth way more often than you need to. I've been running my saw setup for years now and I push em all the way to 80% and sometimes a little past if I'm in a pinch. The fuel savings from swapping earlier are pretty tiny compared to the cost of new teeth and the downtime to change em out. Plus half the time those "premature bearing failures" are more about bad maintenance than dull teeth... people just don't grease their stuff right.