Deas Plant
Senior Member
Spreader bar photos.
Hi, JDOFMEMI.
No sooner said than done. In the third photo where the spreader bar is clamped in the 4-in-1 bucket, if you look at where the back of the bucket floor is clamped into the lugs, you may notice a gap between the top of the bucket floor and the up-slope of the lug. That gap should not be there. It took me a little fast talking to convince the owner that the bar should be held firm with NO chance for up-and-down movement.
Once I finally convinced him that he was NOT a cross between a 'horizontal social worker' and a computer - a bedroom atletics-indulging know-all - we welded some bar stock into that gap and the bar worked far better.
Donchya just hate it when your employees know more than you do? LOL.
As mentioned in my earlier post, the main frame is made from 6" RHS with 1/2" bisalloy plate welded to the bottom for wear plate. When I am rebuilding/replacing the wear plates, I only replace the two main beams and then hardface the undersides of the 4 spreaders that run from front to rear and hold the 2 main beams otgether. This means that the undersides of the 2 main beams are a little proud from the spreaders, allowing their cutting edges - the bisalloy wear plate - to get a better bite at the landscape.
I also use this spreader bar to strip short grass from sites that are not too uneven for that practice to work, to trim batters and to cut shallow drains around the toes of all cut batters on a house site to facilitate drainage. Roll the bucket right back, place the rear cutting edge of the spreader bar at the toe of the batter, lean on it a little and back up a foot or so and you will have a nice shallow spoon drain. You may have to do this several times in harder ground or even go round and loosen the drains-to-be up with the bucket teeth before removing the loosened material with the spreader bar.
We chose to only have 2 main beams and to keep the 'front-to-rear' dimension of the bar down so that we could place it on the deck of the float and walk forward over the top of the bar, straddling it. In photos 1 and 2, you may notice lugs welded on longitudinally at one end. This allows us to carry the spreader bar onto the float in this fashion and also to carry the bar into places where we could not get if the bar was carried across the machine. That bar is 13 feet wide - a pretty good working width for a Cat 943/953 - but a lotta gates ain't that wide and a lotta rows of trees ain't that far apart either.
A little note - it does pay to have good 4-in-1 bucket rams to get the best out of these spreader bars as we ALL tend to do a fair of dragging backwards out of corners with them. They also seem to cut better travelling backwards and are certainly more controllable in reverse when cutting heavy.
Hope this helps.
Hi, JDOFMEMI.
No sooner said than done. In the third photo where the spreader bar is clamped in the 4-in-1 bucket, if you look at where the back of the bucket floor is clamped into the lugs, you may notice a gap between the top of the bucket floor and the up-slope of the lug. That gap should not be there. It took me a little fast talking to convince the owner that the bar should be held firm with NO chance for up-and-down movement.
Once I finally convinced him that he was NOT a cross between a 'horizontal social worker' and a computer - a bedroom atletics-indulging know-all - we welded some bar stock into that gap and the bar worked far better.
Donchya just hate it when your employees know more than you do? LOL.
As mentioned in my earlier post, the main frame is made from 6" RHS with 1/2" bisalloy plate welded to the bottom for wear plate. When I am rebuilding/replacing the wear plates, I only replace the two main beams and then hardface the undersides of the 4 spreaders that run from front to rear and hold the 2 main beams otgether. This means that the undersides of the 2 main beams are a little proud from the spreaders, allowing their cutting edges - the bisalloy wear plate - to get a better bite at the landscape.
I also use this spreader bar to strip short grass from sites that are not too uneven for that practice to work, to trim batters and to cut shallow drains around the toes of all cut batters on a house site to facilitate drainage. Roll the bucket right back, place the rear cutting edge of the spreader bar at the toe of the batter, lean on it a little and back up a foot or so and you will have a nice shallow spoon drain. You may have to do this several times in harder ground or even go round and loosen the drains-to-be up with the bucket teeth before removing the loosened material with the spreader bar.
We chose to only have 2 main beams and to keep the 'front-to-rear' dimension of the bar down so that we could place it on the deck of the float and walk forward over the top of the bar, straddling it. In photos 1 and 2, you may notice lugs welded on longitudinally at one end. This allows us to carry the spreader bar onto the float in this fashion and also to carry the bar into places where we could not get if the bar was carried across the machine. That bar is 13 feet wide - a pretty good working width for a Cat 943/953 - but a lotta gates ain't that wide and a lotta rows of trees ain't that far apart either.
A little note - it does pay to have good 4-in-1 bucket rams to get the best out of these spreader bars as we ALL tend to do a fair of dragging backwards out of corners with them. They also seem to cut better travelling backwards and are certainly more controllable in reverse when cutting heavy.
Hope this helps.
