Being a fan of the Transformer movies, I couldn’t help but come up with the name MEGATRON for the newest addition to the OOT fleet.
I’ve been after some type of track building device for some time and have been surfing e bay and the Trading Post for over six months, working out what’s available and at what cost.
The RUDD rebate cut the cost of all industrial equipment and tractors overnight, with heaps of blokes taking advantage of the 50% rebate and updating their gear. A huge influx of second hand gear for sale has seen prices drop. Two years ago, you would have paid perhaps 10 or 12 grand all day for something like a Massey Ferguson MF40 industrial loader/backhoe, which is an old 2WD 1970s jigger based on a tractor.
Now you can probably get a 4WD tractor with a front end loader for that.
It’s been somewhat of a quandary wondering what to buy.
A bobcat is easy to use and bulk fast. But they can’t dig for shit and haven’t really got much grunt. Once you’ve built your track, the Bobcat is the king of track maintenance, but a track builder it’s not.
A wheeled loader is pretty cool, with much more grunt than a Bobcat, but again, they can’t dig much. And dig you must to source dirt for jumps and berms. Big - arsed wheeled loaders are also fairly pricey.
A dozer is a cool bit of gear. They don’t stop for much and effectively mulch as they go. Run a dozer around your preferred track layout and you end up with a few inches of churned up mega - roosty - loamy stuff to hool about on like an idiot until it becomes hard packed.
Dozers can’t pick dirt up though and aren’t a backhoe, so they don’t dig real good. They also tend to churn everything up wherever they go. It’s hard to ‘tread lightly’ in a D6.
A Drott would be cool. A Drott is like a dozer, with tracks and perhaps a backhoe. You can get ‘em with a four in one loader bucket on the front. Very serious bit of kit for track building, but out of my price range.
What is then the most universal bit of kit? MEGATRON.
The girls favour the name ‘Bumblebee’ because it’s yellow like the dude off Transformers of the same name. He’s a Massey Ferguson MF 40 ‘Industrial Loader/Backhoe’.
He’s got a Perkins 4 cylinder diesel (albeit in this case fully rooted), an industrial strength front end loader, an industrial strength backhoe and a powerful hydraulic pump that runs both. No waiting for slow old tractor hydraulics here, this thing has some grunt.
And no brakes to speak of.
Limited stability, as it turns out, unless the outriggers are down.
The air conditioning is basic.
The whole unit looks fairly rude, really.
I bought her for the princely sum of two grand, knowing fully well that her engine sucked, but acknowledging that apart from that she was a reasonable platform from which to build a valuable tool.
I had her asessed by Des the local tractor guru prior to purchase. I cast my eye over the rig, checking out bushes and pins for wear. All looked pretty good. Sure, there was surface rust, but that was hardly an issue.
She could be started and her bits went up and down as they should, with minimal leakage, which was a good sign.
I got her home on Ernie’s tray truck.
I just had to give her a run.
The bitch smoked liked a joint. She then took a leaf out of Transformers and urinated hydraulic oil all over me when I tried to use the backhoe. Her brakes were rude and slewed uncomfortably to the left when applied, not helped in the slightest by the slew of the heavy backhoe thingy bolted to the back, which was leaking and didn’t bloody work that good.
It’s motor ran, but had only a portion of the grunt it should have had. Despite it’s issues, the thing was a beast and had heaps of potential.
I was able to run down trees up to around 6 inches diameter with ‘gay abandon’. I’m not boasting about environmental destruction here, but I have soft sandy soil and some feral regrowth that needs to be removed. The trees are now scared and appear to be retreating further into the forest.
I can dig a bit. The loader bucket has some mumbo by itself as long as the back wheels have grip enough to push it along.
The backhoe has some serious mumbo, despite it’s urinating disposition.
Any idiot can drive it. Select your ratio (effectively a 4 speed) then push on forwards or reverse with your right foot. Yep, it’s a bloody auto with a torque converter.
Please ignore the type from the photo above. It’s quite obvious on closer inspection that Right = push shit over and Left = go backwards to line up more shit to push over.
The pedal in the middle allows more revs to be added to speed up the loader actuation or road speed of the whole shebang. Believe me, She Bangs!
So, it’s rebuild time.
I’ve sent the offending leaking hydraulic line from the backhoe off to my local guru and $80 later the digger from hell is right to wreak havoc.
The motor is fully rooted. A cursory inspection of the intake hose revealed a rudely large orifice that had allowed the ingestion of approximately 347.5 Kgs of local dirt into the motor. Yes, the same motor that effectively now has no rings. No rings = No power. Bummer.
This pipe runs between the air cleaner and the injectors and yes I found a fair bit of dirt in the injectors too, so it’s all gotta come apart.
I’ve had much better luck with the loader. I set about greasing the bejeesus out of every nipple in sight. I came unstuck almost immediately when a few nipples resisted my advances. Grease spewed forth on my side of the nipple, obviously not getting anywhere near the shit that actually needed the lube.
So I took the stress off the pins by lowering the bucket to the ground lightly, so they’d come out easy. Removal of the pins showed that it was not the nipple that was at fault, but the hole in the pin that allowed the flow of grease.
The grease runs from the nipple, through a hole running along the centre of the pin, then into another hole drilled across the pin allowing the goo to push out and lube the outside of the pin and the inside of the bush or hole it runs in.
I drilled out the holes with my cordless and poked other orifices with wire until the flow was all good again.
Note that grease will follow the path of least resistance, meaning that it’s not certain that everything that needs lubing gets lubed. So to help make sure, I completely removed each pin and greased both the entire pin and the bush it was going back into before replacing it and pumping it with the grease gun.
If I didn’t do this, the grease might just run to the left hand side, like can be seen in the above photo, without actually heading to the right hand side of the pin at all.
These jiggers are based on a Massey 165 or 168 tractor and are ready to have a PTO and three point linkage attached. If I wanted to, I could turn the beast into an agricultural beast that could plough a field.
Having now done pretty much all I either have time for or are capable of, it’s time to float the old girl down to Des’s join to have her motor rebuilt.
If the bore liners are okay (which is doubtful) then we may get away with an in - chassis rebuild, at a cost of maybe only a couple of grand.
I think I’m dreaming though and the dirt will have fully rooted the liners. 5 grand is more like it. Assume the head needs a tune up, the crank needs a grind and the pistonis are rude.
It’s no race weapon and is old, slow and not that capable compared to new and larger equipment available, but compared to a shovel and wheelbarrow it is the shit.
Now all I need is someone to show me how to use it.
I can see Blue grinning right now.