Great Dane excavating co.

[Cooper]

Just some more pics of the dozer in the shop

[Cooper]

My simple tensioning is holding up. I cover it with graphite, try to keep all the parts with a dry lubricant.



Have some wear on the track rollers. They are brass with steel shaft. I'm upgrading them from 1/8" to 3/16 stainless shaft and milling centers out for bronze bushing.



Enough room to replace 1/8" shaft with 3/16"



This is the amount of brass that will make up the rollers. I'm going to be using non flanged bushings, just press them in.

[Cooper]

The paint for dumptruck. Again I'm probably going with paint as last coat and not clearing at this time. I did put my tail between my legs and admitted defeat on the dump box and hydraulic hoist. But,,, have some secret parts coming. Oh and reg, you shouldn't get any hate mail from my wife,, I just have to look forward to having four more furry feet sometime this summer!!! If anything she might send you a thank you letter!!! Lol!!! The red paint just doesn't look as good in pics, it turned out well for me. And I'm going to try to add some detail to interior, that's why the dash and wheel. I want to keep them dark so not seen but still there if you look. If I can discipline myself she might be a candidate for build of month, just not sure what month, or year,,lol!! But the building of the old bed and hydraulic hoist wasn't a complete failure, I did learn some things along way. Like its good to save money by doing something yourself because you will need that money when you realize you aren't doing well and need to pay someone else!!!!

[Cooper]

Oh and the other pieces in the pic are the light buckets and hardware for the d11 lights.

[Lil Giants]

Yeah, Reg makes some beautiful boxes & his screwdrive is the smoothest & powerful in the market today, you made a good buy.

Your dozer don't look to be too bad for wear, care to take a guess how many cubes it pushed this yr?

[Cooper]

Humm, I will have to think a bit, five skidsteer buckets, two back hoe buckets, then the countless hours moving the same material around in the backyard pit. I would be guessing that I've got at least 40-50 hours on it. But my wife said I was crazy, I have a lot more than that. She said I had about four hours a week on it on average, 30 weeks that's about 120 hours. Man time flies by when you are havin fun. !!!!! She may be a lot more accurate than I had originally thought, quite a bit of time pushin dirt at our Riverlot during the weekends too.

[Cooper]

Bent blade lift eyebolt. As you can see it wasn't threaded all the way because I didn't pay as close attention to keeping blade square when I made it and unthreaded it to get closer to level.


This is the oil from most of the summer.



Just some more pics





I'm going to remake the link between track carriers and frame. I made it with allowance for left and right side to flex a bit like the 1:1. But to me I think it is unneeded and just allows too much play for tractor.

And don't throw away that old recliner!! It's my swivel for painting and working on things!! Simple , big, and easy to stow when not using!!

[Cooper]

Just cutting for threads on a new filter, I stuff holes with ear plug material so nothing gets inside.


And insides of old filter. A couple particles but pretty good.

Made up the new piece connecting track carriers to frame. Has very little torsion movement.


And after thinking about making all new track pins (and inspecting them) I decided to just keep them until failure. For 90% of them it looks as if the brass has worn and not the links. New pins will be make of stainless or steel. In the pics you can see the two wheel carrier pivot pins. I made a new location, down 1/8" and back 1/4". This will get the track more flat to surface and more force to front. When originally made I had the front and rear wheels slightly higher than middle, not intentionally, just a miscalculation. This new pin location also takes most of the play out of the stretched track and reapplies original tensioning locations. I don't know if you can see the track laying flat and up front it curves up some (front wheel is little higher-that's what new pin location in back solves)

[Cooper]

Some progress over the weekend,



Yes I know the buckets are big, they are hiding 10mm LEDs. I have a lot (80+\-) of them. (Impulse purchase from a while back and need to use them). Now I need to wait for some resistors to show up in mail-couple days I think. )

And I am like a kid, rushed home over lunch to see if mailman had stopped yet, nope, not yet. Have some black shiny box thing for the truck build!!!) well back to work for a while, looking forward to end of day and seeing a big cardboard box on doorstep .

[Supermario]

As much as I hate to see the dozer all apart, thanks for sharing a closer look at the beauty.
Besides, this is normal wear and maintenance not a case of use and abuse
Sure brings back memories for me seeing it tore apart. I've personally rebuilt 4 D10 dozers and countless D8's over the years. Enjoyed it all. BTW , The link that connects the track frames to the machine is refered to as a " hard bar".
I made the same mistake when I installed new motors on my plastic dozer. Put them to high and now the dozer rocks from front to back when you blade down and causes even more fun when you want to blade up and it takes forever to react until it rocks forward . Will fix this winter for sure.

Anyway, great machine and build Ralph. I can see how much time and effort you must have put into her. I see lots of tiny threaded holes in the close ups


Mario

[Cooper]

Mario, here at Great Dane construction co., we are an equal opportunity employer. You don't need an education as we are more than willing to educate our employees in the way we want. It doesn't take a monkey to wrench on our machines, here is one of our employees now working on hooking up lights and some minor other work,




And some other inspection areas



Now you don't need to be a rock scientist and we don't pay more than peanuts but our employees are well taken care of.

My hands are way too big for those little nuts and bolts so I've outsourced most of the work to the locals. They have a better grasp on those hard to handle nuts. But it is hard getting good help, as soon as the five o'clock bell rings they get all squirrelly and want to go home!!!

(Just couldn't help it! I know )

[Cooper]

Originally Posted by Supermario

As much as I hate to see the dozer all apart, thanks for sharing a closer look at the beauty.
Besides, this is normal wear and maintenance not a case of use and abuse
Sure brings back memories for me seeing it tore apart. I've personally rebuilt 4 D10 dozers and countless D8's over the years. Enjoyed it all. BTW , The link that connects the track frames to the machine is refered to as a " hard bar".
I made the same mistake when I installed new motors on my plastic dozer. Put them to high and now the dozer rocks from front to back when you blade down and causes even more fun when you want to blade up and it takes forever to react until it rocks forward . Will fix this winter for sure.

Anyway, great machine and build Ralph. I can see how much time and effort you must have put into her. I see lots of tiny threaded holes in the close ups


Mario

Yea I'm still on the learning curve and keeping track of what to improve on for a future dozer. The front and back wheels ended up being slightly higher than the rollers. Like you said it would enable the dozer to rock a bit. I did also try and lower the attitude of the front of machine to give a bit more traction to compensate for that with different locations of pins going through the hard bar and now having the back wheels lowered will help more (I hope). Man I would have loved to been beside you when tearing into a d10!! Thanks, it's been a low problem machine so far and like you said just some normal wear. I finally did something right

[Supermario]

Lol. I wonder if I can train the black squirrels in my yard to do that. I think my wife might have an issue with a squirrel in the basement though

always nice to mix a little nature and wildlife into our metal and electronics hobby I say!

[TRUCKMAKER]

You guys are just NUTS

[Cooper]

Yes we are!!! Hopefully you guys got a good chuckle out of it!! Life is too short, and I'm thankful to be able to have such a good time livin, and trying to make it enjoyable!!

Anyway,, got a package from another one of them Canadians. .




Pictures just don't do these justice!! Thank you reg, RCP!! You are making an excellent product!! I'm almost glad I failed miserably on my attempt on the dump hoist!! Once I get the d11 back running I'm devoting my time back to the dump build. A couple days, I'm waiting on a couple resistors for the lights.

Also showed up were some drivetrain components from rcbrim, axles and the tranny. I got the 2 speed 1:64 or whatever the lower version was.

[Cooper]

Got some more goodies today, the 1w resistors needed to finish d11lights. A couple punisher driveshafts for the dump trk, and it found these slider center detent pots. I'm thinking of installing them on my radio for the excavator, replacing dial pots and relocating them for finger friendly.

I did get the switch installed late last night


And I'm not sure about this but I picked it up a wallyworld. It's a series of push button switches. I'm thinking of tying this into the battle switch to be turned on / off via radio. Then I could manually have on or off whatever I wanted, like fan, front lights, back lights, sound ect.


And I finally have the rest of tonight to try and get d11 done so I can start working on that awesome dump box I got from reg!!! ****, I've been thinking of installing a plastic liner because it looks so good and I don't want to scratch it!! Damm something of mine that doesn't have scratches!! It just wouldn't fit in .

[RCP57]

Hurry up would ya! I wanna see scratches in that bed ASAP!

[Cooper]

Lol!! Had to take a break, my eyes are starting to bleed , my hands shaking , my brain is overheating!! All these little wires and keep grabbing the darn wrong end of the soldering iron!!!!!

[RCP57]

Originally Posted by Cooper

Lol!! Had to take a break, my eyes are starting to bleed , my hands shaking , my brain is overheating!! All these little wires and keep grabbing the darn wrong end of the soldering iron!!!!!

It sounds like working on the dozer is too stressful...better work on the dump truck instead....

[Cooper]

The birds nest I've been working on

And don't think that I don't keep looking over at the truck in pieces!!

I've been keeping your box covered, protected from dog drool and cat hair!! Lol!! I'm sure when she is done I'll be hauling some fat pu,,, uhh kitty around. It's gonna be a kittie magnet for sure!!