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Old crane hand told me to stop swinging the boom on every lift and start crabbing instead
He said I was wasting fuel and putting extra wear on the tracks by not just walking the machine into position first, and after trying it for a week I'm down 10 gallons of diesel but up 15 minutes per job - anyone else get told to change their approach and see a trade-off like that?
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rowanr884mo ago
Wasting fuel and putting extra wear on the tracks" sounds like old school logic that dont fit modern machines.
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caseywalker4mo ago
Is it really that deep though? A few extra minutes of idle time or a couple more passes on a jobsite doesn't seem like the end of the world. I've seen guys run old Cats for years doing stuff that supposedly "wastes fuel" and they still hold up fine. Modern machines have all kinds of fuel mapping and auto-idle stuff anyway, so a little extra idling is probably not even registering on the meter. Feels like one of those things people stress about that doesn't actually matter in the long run.
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lisab324mo ago
Probably not even registering on the meter" is a dangerous way to think. That few extra minutes adds up over a season, and those extra passes chew through undercarriage way faster than people want to admit. I've watched fuel bills climb 15% just from lazy idling habits on modern machines with auto-idle. Nobody's saying your old Cat will explode, but it's death by a thousand cuts. The difference between making money and barely breaking even on a job is often that small stuff.
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