fast*st
Member
Equipment
M7040, L2900, F550 ford, Yanmar vio70 excavator, Case 580, JD 350 dozer, JD 644E
So at HSC we have a good sized orange, while giving it a cleaning I went to wipe off a smear of grease from the loader mounting bracket on the left side to find out that the hefty cast bracket is cracked.
So this crack is about an inch long, there's some webbing on the back side and the bracket is welded to the steel pipe that makes up the frame. What's confusing me is that this is heavy cast steel and I can't think what would cause a crack through the thickest part of the web and not take the rest of the bracket clean off. The loader pins are all nice and greased so it can float a bit and not bind, we do use it pretty hard and try not to do bad things. It does have about 500 hours of pushing a 9' snow plow attached to the loader arms, we don't run front chains so the side load isn't huge but the kubota warning is the loader arms collapsing not snapping the big brackets off.
My guess is that it could have been a defect in the casting, and at something around $1200 clams its going to be worth attempting to weld. Typical stop drill about 1 inch further than the crack, V it out to the root, preheat and go at it with some 10018 rods, post heat and keep it warm for a few hours.
We don't happen to have a magnaflux test set but was wondering, wrap the welding cables around the part and do a nice heavy dc bead on some steel while sprinkling the area with metal dust, might work.
So this crack is about an inch long, there's some webbing on the back side and the bracket is welded to the steel pipe that makes up the frame. What's confusing me is that this is heavy cast steel and I can't think what would cause a crack through the thickest part of the web and not take the rest of the bracket clean off. The loader pins are all nice and greased so it can float a bit and not bind, we do use it pretty hard and try not to do bad things. It does have about 500 hours of pushing a 9' snow plow attached to the loader arms, we don't run front chains so the side load isn't huge but the kubota warning is the loader arms collapsing not snapping the big brackets off.
My guess is that it could have been a defect in the casting, and at something around $1200 clams its going to be worth attempting to weld. Typical stop drill about 1 inch further than the crack, V it out to the root, preheat and go at it with some 10018 rods, post heat and keep it warm for a few hours.
We don't happen to have a magnaflux test set but was wondering, wrap the welding cables around the part and do a nice heavy dc bead on some steel while sprinkling the area with metal dust, might work.
