Learned a hard lesson about hydraulic oil temperature on the Mississippi last week

I was running a 12-inch cutterhead dredge near Baton Rouge and the hydraulic oil hit 190 degrees. The pump started making a whining noise I never heard before, so I shut down and found the cooler was completely clogged with weeds. Had to pull 3 hours of overtime to clean it out. Anyone else had trouble with weed buildup blocking their coolers in shallow water?

2 comments

2 Comments

robert648d ago

I burnt my arm on a cooler once cleaning weeds out of it on the Kaskaskia River. Hit 195 degrees on a 10-inch cutterhead and the whole system started shaking like a washing machine. The cooler was packed so thick with duckweed and milfoil you could not even see the fins. Had to spend 4 hours with a pressure washer cussing at every inch of that thing. The whining pump sound you heard is probably the hydraulic fluid screaming for mercy right before it cooks your pump seals. Makes you wonder if the weeds are smarter than us for clogging things up when we least expect it.

skyler_fox728d ago

And here I thought weeds were just dumb plants, but turns out they're running a full-on sabotage operation against our hydraulic systems. Between the duckweed clogging your cooler and the milfoil turning your cutterhead into a paint shaker, I'm half convinced they've got a union meeting every spring to plan their attacks. At least the pressure washer gave you a good arm workout even if it did leave you smelling like river bottom for the next week.