Question about hitting 10,000 hours on the same Grove RT and what it made me realize

Finley Wright · 2026-10-11T20:25:05.048467+00:00

So I was doing my pre-shift walkaround on the old Grove RT540E we keep at the yard in Amarillo when I noticed the hour meter rolled past 10,000. I've been running this same machine on and off for about seven years, mostly picking steel and setting precast panels at a hospital site off Coulter Street. That number hit me weird because I remember when it read 3,800 and I thought that was a lot. What got me is that in all those hours, the thing that actually saved my butt was not the big stuff like load charts or boom angle. It was the small habit a guy named Reuben drilled into me back in 2018: always check your outrigger pads before you swing, even if you just set them yourself. I've caught soft ground under a pad at least a dozen times because of that, including once when a guy had moved my cribbing to use on his own rig. So I guess my question is, does anybody else keep a personal log of their hours on a specific machine, and did a certain number make you stop and think about how you got there?

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