Just spent 3 days tracking down a swing brake issue that turned out to be a loose ground wire

Had a 100 ton Grove acting up on a job site near Chattanooga, kept losing boom swing control intermittently, and I tore through the hydraulic schematics twice before a buddy told me to check the negative cable on the battery box, which took maybe 10 minutes once I thought of it.

3 comments

3 Comments

the_riley6d ago

Ground issues are always the absolute worst (and I mean that). They hide so well under all that grease and dirt, mocking you the whole time. You check everything fancy and forget the simplest thing in the whole world. Been there with a crane and a bad engine ground that took two days to find. Now I check cables first before I even open a schematic.

charlie1986d ago

Oh I gotta push back on that a little. I find bad grounds are actually pretty easy to find if you just use a voltmeter and check voltage drop across the connection while it's under load. Sure, they can hide in plain sight under crud, but there's a big difference between a ground that looks bad and one that actually is bad. A good load test on the circuit will tell you in about ten seconds if that ground strap is the problem or not.

parker_hall56d ago

Dude yes! Nothing worse than chasing a ground that's just sitting there laughing at you. I gotta say though @charlie198 makes a good point about the voltmeter trick, but sometimes even that doesn't save you from the ones that look perfectly clean and still act up.