Building A Roll Cage For a CAT 977 Track Loader

so [Music] [Music] what's up everybody welcome back to diesel creek my name's matt it is a windy wet and wonderful day here in uh western pennsylvania it is december and it is cold and that wind just cuts right through you but uh regardless that doesn't mean that we don't have things that need guns so i actually got my engine drive welder on the back of the truck here and we are headed up to my buddy's house to fab up a rops for my cat 977 that uh has been absent from the channel for a while anyways i'm sure it's not going to be a good time for me but uh i figure you guys might want to join along i'm sure it'll be uh fun for you guys hopefully you're watching this someplace warmer today's video sponsor is going to be omaze omaze gives away one-of-a-kind prizes and experience while donating money to chosen charities all across the world their sustainable approach to fundraising means that non-profits can spend less time and money raising funds and instead focus on serving the needs of 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even noticed it ain't been here but uh the old grit has been resting over here at my buddy's place he's trying to use it to do some clearing but without some grouser tracks and rops it's kind of a dangerous proposition so we're going to fix all that today i think all right so the 977 has been resting for a little bit the batteries are not the best to begin with so uh yeah we're gonna throw the charger on these things and hopefully we can get her get her to pop off for us well i forgot to turn the camera on like an idiot one of the batteries went bad so i had to sub in this battery that'll be all right we're going to warm up here a few minutes driving over we're gonna be working all right we got her over here where we can work on her now up on the hard pack out of the mud but the plan is here we're gonna build us a rollover protection cage for this thing because everybody wants to be doing some clea tree yeah tree clearing and pretty dangerous because branch snaps off or top snaps out of a tree or something and come right back and squish you like a bug so we'll put a roll cage on this thing to protect him from the limbs and in case he would decide to upset it and then the other thing we're going to be doing is we're going to weld some cleats onto these street pads so that he can get a little bit of traction on a hillside because if it's dry out it's workable but it's not going to be dry until spring so we got plenty of work ahead of us in the wet weather so i got some 3 8 by 1 inch flat bar here we're going to whack that up into 11 and a half inch length should work out perfect we're going to put a cleat on every other track and then all that 4x4 square tube down there is what's going to make up our rollover protection cage [Music] so well there we go this is all 3 8 by 1 inch flat bar we cut these all up these are going to go on the track cleats for a little bit of better traction or basically just welding browser bar on there i'm aware that these aren't going to last for a long time because they're just mild steel but this is a cheap way to achieve what we need to anyway to weld them on there they really should be beveled so buddy's going to sit here at the bench vise and bevel them up imagine we're going to be cracking beers and grinding on these for a while so so [Music] [Music] well it is the next day and we're gonna start trying to get some of these cleats welded on here first so yesterday we got all this stock cut and uh buddy put a little bevel on them there so uh this looks like it's gonna be a great time a lot a lot of welding a lot of rod burning so anyway the plan here we will uh put these like so on every other cleat and uh hopefully that should help us quite a bit with some traction i like to keep it pretty honest with you guys so i'm just gonna go ahead and tell you right now i haven't ever done this before i have seen it done uh even stood there and handed guys rods while they uh they welded them on but i've never done it myself so today's a bit of a learning experience for both of us i think all right so we're gonna weld the we're gonna weld the flat bar onto the first lug of every other pad here so i'm gonna get those all polished up first so we can get a nice good weld on it so all right well i guess i'll go ahead and do my little commentary here before i fire up that welding machine and make all kind of racket basically that's what that's going to look like after it's welded on there i'm using the magnet there to hold it 90 degrees and then i built this little jig fixture real quick and what that's going to do is keep the bars all the same distance from the edge and that should be centered in the track here and i'm going to go ahead and tack each end of it first and then take the magnet and the jig away and then just using my little propane torch here i'm going to heat it up and take all the chill out of it and i'll show you when i do that you'll be able to kind of wash the the moisture wick away from everything and then we'll know that it's good and hot and we can go ahead and lay a nice bead in there on each side fully welded all the way around and hope that it doesn't go anywhere so [Music] [Music] hey there was a time when i was good at welding but it i think that time has passed i don't do it enough anymore we need a little more heat too [Music] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so so [Music] so well then it is the next day the weather has been improving as you can no doubt tell in the last time lapse but i uh i got the tops of both sides done so i guess we're ready to try to fire this pig back up and back it up so i can do another set i tell you what i have no affiliation with four knee nor hobart electric but the difference between hobart welding rods and the forney both 7018's both brand new boxes the difference was astounding the hobart's weld so much better than the 40s that laid in way nicer than the opposite side here which was done with the forney it just i thought i was really sucking and it turns out it's just bad electric bad electrodes by the uh the seams of it because i was really happy with my welds for the rest of this after i switched over to these hobarts well i wanted to crank up this machine right now so that i can move it back and get the tracks to where i can weld on some more cleats and we have a problem i think i mentioned earlier in the video [Music] so this battery here dead celled it's no bueno this one here is still mediocre at best this battery is just my little battery i've been using for a jump pack it only has like it's rated for 925 cranking amps at zero but let me tell you put a load tester on it it doesn't put that out so the old girl just does not want to pop off it is pretty cold out here today a glow plug that even shot a little bit of brake cleaner in there nothing so there is something we can do here so if you got yourself a welding machine you basically have a jump starter that will jump start just about anything now there is some danger in doing this so i'm going to show you how to do it without hurting anything so we'll fire up our welder and just for now we're going to let it idle down that says 15 to 25 volts on it so that means that at the very bottom of the fine setting here we should be at 15 volts but we got to double check that before we hurt something but get your multimeter set that to 200 so we don't screw the multimeter up you got to make sure that you have your machine set the dc electrode positive it just means that this part is on the plus and the ground is on the minus all right now we're at low idle so this reading is not accurate because when we connect to our battery it's going to jump the idle up to high so we got to click this thing at the high idle to get an accurate reading you could jump a 12 star 12 volt system but i wouldn't leave it on there very long batteries on this thing so let's go ahead and hook them up and give her all right we've got our ground on there and in this case i'm actually going to hook up a positive to this positive because i have this battery looped in here and yeah here goes that all right so i can tell that we definitely have good connection here we'll preheat it for 30 seconds and hopefully this thing pops off this has got to be a youtube record for longest cold start ever there we go oh that was beautiful [Music] oh it's a few days later here it's warmed up a bit so that's good but we got all of our cleats welded on here they've all got a nice coating of rust on them already just from sitting out here it rained all day yesterday but the cleats look good i'm happy with that hopefully it works out it looks like i got a seal out of a track roller down there so the next thing on the agenda here now is we're gonna go ahead and turn this four inch square tube into a roll cage or rops or whatever you want to call it hopefully it never gets used as a roll protection but the main idea here is when you're pushing trees over going to keep any stray limbs from coming back and hitting you or if god forbid something would go wrong and the tree come at you it doesn't crush you it only hits the hits the cage and keeps you alive the machine is sacrificial at that point but hopefully we don't ever have to use it for anything hopefully it's just a cautionary thing like wearing a seat belt and carrying a gun so i guess the first pieces we're going to cut here are going to be our back two legs for the cage i'm going to bring a piece up on either side there and we'll bring them up and figure out what our distance is between there and then we're gonna bring up two pieces off the front here anyways these are not factory mounts somebody put these things on here and i'm gonna just run with the mouse that they already have because they do look like they're pretty well built they're pretty stout half inch plate the welds all look good on them and i think that they're gonna be just fine for what we're doing all right well every single time i show my chop saw here on the channel i get i get a ton of comments asking about it and where you can get one so if you're interested i'll leave an affiliate link down in the description all right looking pretty good really did it go to you yeah to me hold it that might be it right there [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] put some coil on all of our nuts here because we're gonna be running these things in and out a bunch of times and i don't think it doesn't look like they've been out in quite a while sounds like your wallet opening up brad oh yeah that's i heard that last night at the bar a little bit of leverage on this one oh yeah just a little lever [Music] oh bradley's the muscle here [Music] that was oh we go [Music] [Music] thing over it might go the next one i think it will turn on right on counter clock good enough all right well it's big and ugly but it's going to be protection [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] [Music] so so so [Music] all right well i picked this trick up from deboss garage's instagram the other day so i don't have proper center punches or transfer punches rather but take a socket that fits in the hole snug and now your uh punch should fit right in there get it pretty darn good so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] oh [Applause] so [Music] down so foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] a lot of people are always curious about pricing that first batch of steel i got with the tubing was 900 and something 990 something this one was 491 dollars just for one sheet of plate all right well i just picked up this 4 by 10 sheet of quarter inch plate and we're going to use that for the roof and there should be enough plate left over that we're going to be able to cut some gussets out of it and i want to add some i'd like to add some plate gussets to the corners here and i think that'll help keep things rigid as well as uh seal up the ends of the tube make things look a little bit better all right so i'll take our steel plate here wipe this off so we don't ruin a marker i'm gonna cut some gussets here to strengthen up that cage a little bit [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] there's one gusset [Music] all right well we got all our plates cut and dressed up here and i'm gonna have to adjust this big one a little bit but basically that's the gist of it right there gonna be a gusset and i just have to trim that end off it sticks out past the edge ever so slightly back here in the back we're gonna put these on like that and that'll guss it up the frame make it stronger plus cap off the holes in the tubing [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] so well it's a bummer here but i just discovered that the cage is actually out of square somehow or another plus my plate i got a little teeny off on my cut so you know it tapers from front to back a little bit i did know that but i cannot get the overlaps right for the life of me they will not square up if you get one side square the other side's bad out of square so you just gotta cheat them both to be slightly out of square and it's pretty much as good as i can get it i don't like it but i'm gonna have to live with it it's not perfect but it's perfect for what we're doing so time to weld it so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] all righty well boys and girls it is the next day i finally got all the welding done on this pig and i think it turned out pretty good i still got a bunch of slag to chip off and wire wheel up some stuff and a few little ugly spots i'll hit with the grinder dress them up a little bit but uh overall i think it turned out really good i'm happy with it did rain last night so we got a little bit of rust starting already but we're about done i'm gonna clean it up and throw a little coat of paint on it here and then uh we're gonna go see if we can't shove us over a tree huh as you can tell the paint job on this machine is not exactly stellar this isn't a beauty queen or a showpiece so we're gonna go the quick and dirty route here got our can of rust-oleum and a roller and we're just gonna have at it channeling my inner bob ross today oh yeah that's some cat yellow if i've ever seen it it's a little chilly out here so i did heat the uh the whole cage up with the rosebud here first i didn't get it real hot just take the chill out of the metal otherwise i don't think this paint would set up on here [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] um [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] well there's a big old root ball right there just a little sample test of the new grousers and so far a lot better traction because i think we tried to push this one over before and no dice this is probably a 75-foot tree pretty big boy but uh they're wanting to clear out this whole area for pasture so that'll be the next part you see with the 977 my hand for size that's a big boy but the 977 pulled it off that problem and the paint job turned out all right for a brush and roller deal i put a bead of silicone in around the roof plate there so that we don't get any water between the welds and rotting out between the plate and the box tube at least that's the idea but it's all right it's not perfect but it's perfect for what we're doing so i'm happy with it and it should keep us safe while we're out here working on a hillside and knocking down some big trees all right so there we go a successful first test of the temporary grouser bars we welded on here they provided excellent traction and shoving that tree over and the rops that we built provided excellent protection should that tree have come back at me like it almost did for a second i don't know if you can tell in the video i thought it was starting to go so i backed away from it and it started coming right back at me sitting back where it wanted so she was stubborn but the old 977 made short work of her so anyways we're gonna have some videos coming up real soon of doing a bunch of clearing out here at my buddy's place and we're gonna be taking out a whole bunch of trees and pushing brush piles and carrying logs and all sorts of stuff with this thing so it's gonna get a workout and hopefully you guys are interested in seeing that because it's coming whether you like it or not as always guys if you like the video don't forget to give it a big old thumbs up it really helps out the channel doesn't cost you guys a thing and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe so i can catch you on the next episode thanks for watching later [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Diesel Creek

Views: 604,725

Keywords: cat, caterpillar, 941, 955, 977, d4, d5, d6, d7, d8, d9, dozer, machine, equipment, heavy, killdozer, build, welding, fabrication, komatsu, deere, hitachi, volvo, allis, chalmers, fiat, kroil

Id: OzxjU7Dq6Ik

Length: 57min 49sec (3469 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021