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Shoutout to the guy who told me to run my cutterhead slower in sand, now I can't tell if he was right
I was pulling sand through a 10 inch cutter at my usual 1,100 rpm and eating wear plates every 6 weeks on a job outside Baton Rouge, so an old operator on the crew told me to drop it to around 850 and see what happened. Three months in, the plates are lasting way longer but my production numbers fell about 12 percent, and the office is asking why the cubic yards dropped. Was he right and I just need to push the swing speed to make it up, or was I better off burning plates and keeping the numbers up?
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the_daniel8h ago
Three months in and plates lasting way longer, and you are calling that a win? You ate plates every six weeks before, sure, but plates are a wear item and a known cost. You can budget for plates. You cannot budget for the office deciding your crew is slow and moving the work to somebody else. Twelve percent on cubic yards at a job outside Baton Rouge, with that kind of volume, is real money walking out the door every single day, and no plate bill is going to cover that. The old operator gave you the safe move, not the right move. The production number is the only thing the office looks at, so dropping rpm just traded a problem they can see and measure for a problem they will blame on you. Slow it down when the plates come out of your own pocket, not before.
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