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Tried running my 8 inch cutterhead at a lower RPM on a Mississippi River job and the suction line quit plugging up
Last week I was dredging a sandbar near Muscatine and kept plugging the 10 inch suction line every 20 minutes, so I dropped the engine from 1800 to 1500 RPM and it ran clean for 6 straight hours. My fuel burn went down too, but the swing speed felt sluggish in the hard pack. Anybody else mess with their RPM to match the material, or am I just asking for a worn out pump?
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ben82711d ago
Dropping from 1800 to 1500 is only about 17 percent, that's not much at all. Pumps are built to run at different speeds, that's the whole point of having a throttle. If 1500 cleaned up your line for 6 hours straight and saved fuel, the material was telling you something, not the pump. The sluggish swing in hard pack makes sense, less rpm means less hydraulic flow, so you just bump it back up when you hit the tough stuff. Guys run variable speed on dredges all day long, you're not gonna smoke a pump running it a few hundred rpm under max.
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