PC 200 BUCKET REPAIR

[admweld]

Few pics of a bucket i fixed this week.

[ryanjones2150]

Holy smokes. What were the operators doing to tear the bucket up like that?

[old jupiter]

Those guys bring me stuff that makes me say, not "What happened?," but, "What IS it?"

And yet what has turned out to be the good part (besides getting paid) is that even though I don't consider myself to be any great shakes as a welder, I have been able to blow out and weld all the cracks, maybe add some gussets or doublers here and there, and danged if the bucket or the broken stick or whatever it is doesn't go on and work just fine for years and never break again. Good for the reputation, good for the ego. I like these jobs.

You guys who work on this kind of thing, do you do a lot of adapting implements to fit different machines? The guys I work with don't have the funds to buy new excavators and such, so when they sell an old worn-out machine and pick up a better one, I frequently have to torch the mounting flanges off of a bucket and cut out new ones and weld them on in order to fit the bucket to the new machine. I have done lots of this adapting, including altering or fabricating new quick-couplers to grab the buckets. Or I've had to alter the mounts on buckets so they could be mounted to work either toward or away from the cab. I always have to have some big sheets of cardboard for making rough templates as guides for cutting new pieces from thick plate.

I consider myself fortunate that this sort of low-tech welding work is available to a very modestly-talented guy like me. I envy the h--- out of the John Marcellas of the welding world, but what the high-tech, high-skills fellows like him are able to do is hopelessly beyond me.

What do you bet that your operators were using the bucket to break concrete . . . right after they were ripping out some stumps . . . and that your next job will be a broken stick, LOL. But that's good, for you, because a broken stick looks scary to the owner, scary like BIG money, and when you get it back to him completely fixed and further beefed up in a way that de-concentrates the stress loading and spreads it over a much larger area of the stick, the owner breathes a huge sigh of relief.

[com1]

Haha wow. I've never seen one damaged that bad. I would guess your welding job made it better than new huh?

[Tinker Joe 2]

WOW, that is tore up like a screen door in a housing project, that person had to really work hard at they to tear it up, good welding so he can now break it somewhere else

[ryanjones2150]

Um, Joe....you can't call it the "projects" anymore....so insensitive of you. The correct terminology is a "Community Empowerment Center".