Wow. I am not sure how to give an adequate write up about this weekend. I feel like a whole month happened in the space of this last week. To begin with, I want to say I feel blessed.  I very much believe I was watched over this weekend and allowed to be successful. Although my track replacement is not completely done, (I am about 92.73% done) all the hard parts and concerns are over. I should only have a couple hours next weekend and the job will be done.  There were several little miracles that happened this week and I know, although not significant for my eternal progression, Heavenly Father had a hand in all of it.

I didn’t have a great start. I got up there Thursday night, equipped with: 

• 3/4″ Drive Breaker Bar
• 3/4″ Drive Socket (27mm)
• 3/4″ Drive Impact Gun
• 1″ drive breaker bar
• 1″ Drive Socket (27mm)
• 4 ft 1″ Sch 40 black pipe cheater bar
• 6 ft 1-1/4″ Sch 40 Galvanized Pipe Cheater Bar
• A massive desire to be successful 🙂

The first thing I noticed that night was that my 1″ drive Socket had an Outer Diameter (OD) that was too big to allow it to fit onto the bolt heads. The rib of the track pads was too close to the bolt head and interfered with that drive socket. This meant my beefy breaker bar was worthless. So I started in with the 3/4″ set up and got about 20 bolts removed (5 track pads) and then the 3/4″ drive breaker bar broke. At this point I had no way to continue, and it was getting dark and late so I strapped on a headlamp and decided to do a bunch of the bolt clean up. Every bolt head was CAKED in clay and took lots of time to clean them up. I worked until almost midnight. Half of the track pads were under the machine in the dirt with the bolt heads not accessible. On those bolts I cleaned up the nuts that were sticking up and sprayed a lot of WD40 everywhere that night. Fast forward to Friday morning, I got in the car and was about to head down the canyon to Ogden when I decided to first reach out to an old coworker. He has lots of tools and lives in Huntsville. He set me up with a grinder and that allowed me to modify the 1″ drive socket to reduce down the OD enough to allow it to fit on the bolt heads. And with that the project was saved and I was off to the races! 

Well I wouldn’t call it a race. It was slow going! My first concern was removing 196 bolts that have been there for 20 years. It was by far the biggest challenge. Do you all know how big of a number 196 is when you are talking about removing big old bolts? It might as well be a million 🙂  With all the clean up work, breaking the bolts loose and removing the bolts I think I averaged about 8 minutes PER BOLT. Yeah it took a solid 22 hours, between Thursday night, all day Friday, and until 3 on Saturday. And it physically destroyed me. It was very demanding. Yanking on the breaker bar all day took its toll.  The impact gun that I brought was not strong enough to break them loose. Every single bolt (196 of them, did I mention that there were 196?) had to be broken loose with the breaker bar. And that bar itself was not light! It was a bit of a chore to manhandle that around. After working all day Friday I had 33 of the track pads removed which equals 132 bolts. That only left 16 track pads for Saturday which unfortunately still took me till 3p.m. Maybe I was just extremely tired, but the bolts on Saturday all seemed twice as stubborn as the bolts on Friday. During all the bolt removal I probably had 2 dozen bolt heads break off, and when they broke that meant I fell down on the ground very ungracefully. I had 4 or so bolt heads round off on me which then had to be cut out with the grinder. By some miracle my 1″ breaker bar which is bent about 15 degrees off from straight did not break. It got really bad when I had 6 track pads left to go. My prayers were answered though and it survived!  The very last bolt of course was one of the worst. Go figure.  (See Pics 1a-1k “Breaking Bolts”)

Next was the fun part, moving the new chain into place. Mostly because the excavator did all the work. Although this was one of my concerns earlier this week, it went very smoothly. The other concern of the master pin and the press fit turns out to be a false alarm. The master pin was not a press fit. It was a “T bolt” with a retaining pin (like a pin for your receiver hitches where you put a retaining clip on one side).  I think all in all to get the chain down the hill, get the excavator onto the chain, to wrap the chain and put the master pin in place took all of two hours. And compared to removing bolts, this actually was FUN.  (See Pics 2a-2e “Moving Chain” and Pics 3a-3e “Connecting New Chain”)

Moving the Chain

Connecting The Chain

And last but not least, I needed to put the track pads back onto the chain. This also was fun when compared to removing the bolts (but let’s be honest, getting your wisdom teeth pulled is probably fun when compared to removing those bolts).  The one caveat is that I don’t have a torque wrench so to make sure they are tight tight, I have to use my breaker bar for the last 1/4 to 1/2 turn.  I have 33 of the track pads back on but only 18 of them are all the way tight. I worked Saturday night putting on the track pads and tightening the bolts down until I could no longer lift the breaker bar. That happened about 11p.m. :). The black shinny bolts and chain really don’t seem to fit in on my machine. After cleaning up I got out of there at about 11:30.  Luckily, Karianne and the family let me take a good long nap today.  (See Pics 4a-4c “Track Pad Reassembly”)

So…. next weekend.. I will have my excavator operational again and I am going to go dig the trenches for my deepwall septic system leach field. I have 150 feet of 7′ deep trench to dig.  What an incredible miracle that I was able to get the entire chain replaced (well almost) in one weekend. And for less than what the mechanic would have charged to simply replace only 2 or 3 links! (for any economists out there, I know I put in a significant amount of my time, but I can only make money for 40 hours a week right now and since I do not have OT approved, my opportunity cost was $0 . 🙂

To sum up the weekend, I feel very blessed. It was extremely hard work.  If my other track  breaks in order to do it again mentally, I will rent a massive air compressor that can allow my impact driver to deliver some real torque. In addition, I will need to find a buddy and bribe them to come up and help. Any volunteers ?   

I included a link to a few video files as it helps to show what we went through this weekend. 

#30 – Weekly Update Video Files

Enjoy! Until next time. 

Mark