buying and restoring a 30 year old komatsu PC120 excavator

so so [Applause] so so [Music] so [Music] okay i think the more he lifts it off the bed the less it's going to turn he's got it almost lifted off the bed right now so you're saying it would turn yeah so then why then i said jazzy okay i uh i bought this old relic of a kamatsu to kamatu 120 um needs a little little tender love and care but um i'm gonna do that uh this here it needs a door to cover this which i'll try to fabricate best i can the main thing it needs it needs a final drive but it starts up real good to loosen the track on an excavator in here there's a fitting i don't know if i can show you that fitting or not i'll try there's a fitting in there that you loosen up and then the grease the only thing that tightens the track on an excavator is grease believe it or not and so by releasing that i'm going to try to push this track back and you can see from here that this thing will slide back and that's what loosens the track then when you're done you just put grease a grease gun on there and pump this right back out amazing as that seems so we're going to put a log in the bucket and mrs w is going to hold it here and i'm gonna try to push this track back and loosen it [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] what i'm going to do is take a couple of these pads off because i think the the link is right under here um it's really hard to tell i don't see any difference in anything except that one has been welded to keep from coming off so i'm assuming that's probably the one i hope it is anyway [Music] [Music] so so foreign [Music] i don't have any help so i've got to do this by myself and i needed a way to hold the pin so i can get a good hard swing on it so i kind of fabricated this thing to hold the pin for me it'll probably jump out after each one but that's okay at least nobody's going to get hurt that way and i need to heat this baby up back here um i pounded away on this for hours over the weekend and i got nowhere because my torches were empty so i went this morning and filled them now i can heat this piece here this piece i think it's loose in here so it's just a matter of this one so i'll heat that up and swing for everything i got and hope for the best this is not a perfect setup it holds the pin but i really only get one shot at it and then i have to re-tighten up the clamps that flies apart but i'm hoping um that it'll hold on long enough for me to get that pin started i'm going to heat that up now and at least this way i'm not hurting somebody if i miss [Music] oh it did move a little it is moving all right now we got to reset it that's encouraging it moved about an eighth of an inch which i know doesn't sound like much but that's more than i've been able to get try a different kind of clamp here and see if that'll help [Music] all right i'm going to try something different here i put these straps on to hold it um and i think it will hold it but i'm gonna have to be really careful not to melt them when i'm heating that thing up so if i can get that heated up without melting these straps this might actually work this time [Music] the problem is i've got slop here and i've got to keep that from bouncing around i mean the straps are holding it but i got to keep this thing i got to get the slop out of this ah would you look at that finally finally got that pin to cop come out [Music] [Music] there we have it okay i'm at it again you know it's funny if you don't like the weather in hudson valley wait a couple hours uh two days ago it was 90 some degrees and i was dying out here in the heat trying to pound this pin out of here i finally got it then yesterday it rained all day and now today i'm i got a shirt on and i'm freezing it's hard to figure it but anyways um i'm going to raise this machine up now and finish taking the bolts out of this and then this gear will will come off and then i'll finish taking the bolts out of the back side of this final drive and we're ready to pull this thing out of here now the problem is this final drive weighs 350 pounds and i'm not sure how i'll get this one out of here i'm just not sure how i'm gonna get the other one in here but we'll figure something out [Music] [Music] so [Music] so oh it's not as heavy as i thought it would be [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] oh man there's where the weight is [Music] this whole process was not easy thank god it's done that part anyways touch uh so [Applause] [Music] well final drive is in now to hook everything back up well the sprocket for the final drive from the old vinyl drive doesn't match up with the new final drive they're assuring me that that's still the right final drive and they're looking for a sprocket that will fit my final drive and have the outside dimensions and number of teeth that go to my excavator so i'm still waiting on that and it probably will be a couple more days before i really know what's going on because it's a weekend so in the meantime i'm going to try to make that door that's missing on the side of it so that's what i'm going to work on right now [Music] [Music] [Music] so so [Laughter] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] so i know people are going to say why did you go through all that trouble to bend this and then wrap it with angle iron more than one reason number one anytime you bend a piece of steel it adds strength to it number two i don't have the means to make a good proper bend so i'm giving the bend it's making it stronger i'm wrapping it with the with the angle iron which will make it even stronger yet and give me a good place to hook hinges to and and it looks better and number three i can weld in here and leave the face of this with no weld which will make the face look a lot cleaner so there's several reasons for me to do it this way it certainly isn't the easiest way to do it but this is a door that's going to swing so i want as much strength to it as i can so that's why i'm doing that this also has a bend in it it's not just a flat panel so i've got that to work with too also i'm not that good a welder this hides my welds my welds hold but they're not pretty so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] come on [Music] [Applause] [Music] when i was bending the last one um i didn't have as many clamps on there and it bowed in the center which meant the bend isn't straight so i put three extra clamps on here this time i'm hoping that will help [Music] okay so here's where we're at um i got the old final drive out the new final drive in but if you look at this it's not the same as this one over here this one is considerably bigger now they tell me they gave me the right one and it did bolt up but the sprocket didn't fit this is the old sprocket and this bolt pattern is way bigger than this on the new one so [Music] you can see that those two are not the same so they sent me this new sprocket and it looks like it's going to fit on this final drive so i'm hoping this all works out they tell me this is the right final drive so i don't know if somebody changed the final drive over there at some point and this one too because it matched or i don't know what the story is but it's not the same so hopefully this is gonna work uh it bolted up the hydraulics i haven't hooked up but they look like they're right so i guess we'll see what happens so the next step would be to get this sprocket bolted to the final drive then we can try to get the track back on [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay it bolted on just perfectly so the outside's right um and the bolt pattern's right so i don't know yeah hopefully these fittings will fit the new final drive because if these are the original fittings so they should fit them hoses huh nice stay fit at least that one does uh now let's see if this thing this fitting this whole thing should come off i think okay here's the deal i hooked this and this thing goes round and round but it's backwards when i push the lever forward it goes backwards so i'm going to have to do is swap these two hoses you gotta take these off in order to do that um and i'm gonna lose a bunch more fluid doing it but i don't have any choice that's what's gotta be done these things came through like this so i just assumed that the top wouldn't be hooked to the top but it's not um but this was all unhooked when i got this machine so it was i didn't take anything off there was no way for me to to do anything as far as marking them i just had to hope for the best and it didn't work [Music] [Music] so [Applause] no get away get away get away [Music] get out of there pop this one i think that's pretty close to where it needs to be looks like it should go in no it's too much [Music] yes okay [Music] now to tighten the tracks there's a grease fitting in here which i released to loosen the tracks and now i pump grease in there and that'll tighten the track you can watch this you can slowly see it going up okay what we have here it's a guy that owned it before me evidently put a new sleeve in and it's fairly tight with the pin but it's not tight to the steel around it so i'm gonna weld this in i know you everybody's gonna say you shouldn't weld a sleeve in i know that but this thing uh desperately needs the the other side is way worse it desperately needs this pin to be held solid so that this thing doesn't rock this metal around here is fatigued and it needs to be welded in solid i'm not an excavator i'm not going to use this every day for a business so if it holds up for two or three years it's probably fine it may at some point have to be line board and and a new sleeve put in but this is this is the easiest way for me to fix this at this point and and i think if i can get it welded in good enough it should be okay [Music] come a little too hot [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] all right i got it it's not pretty but it's welded in pretty hard pretty solid i put a lot of steel in there this thumb is down too far in the fixed position so what i want to do is take this pin out and something else up here further so that i get the thumb out of the way because if you reach all the way out the thumb actually hits before the bucket does um whoever put this on they should have welded this piece further up but they didn't so now i'm going to try to i want to try to curl the bucket and lift it as much as i can and and hopefully that'll be enough to get it up out of the way because this is a heavy piece of steel i don't want to have to try to lift this every time so i want to use the bucket you know curl under the bucket to do that so i i don't know how much higher i can go and still curl the bucket i'm not sure how much more it goes but we'll see [Applause] [Music] so say what you say yo baby bird [Music] the baby bird fly [Laughter] fly fly big [Music] myself [Music] so [Music] okay this is what i've come up with um i use that piece of angle iron to flip this thing up as far as i can and then it'll fall over and then i have these chunks of steel here that i cut holes in and i'll weld these in and then when when it's time for me to put this thumb down i can pull this pin raise up the boom and let it flop down till it hits the the bucket and then i can use the bucket to adjust it down here where it wants to be so what i got to do is weld these babies in right here now it's up out of the way when i go to use it i can pull that pin curl the bucket catch these things and then guide it to where it needs to go in one of these three holes here perfect so [Music] [Music] good [Music] so [Music] i just bent that i'll put that on at the handle [Music] [Applause] i think that'll work it's not perfect but it'll do the job looks a lot better than it did well that ain't been changed in a while so hey [Music] [Music] okay i sanded it just to get any loose rust off any loose paint there's not really much but this way i can kind of treat the rust a little bit before i paint i'm going to use this navel jelly it's supposed to help get rid of the rust right here you can see a big space a smaller one here but a bigger one here um and that bucket just moves back and forth real sloppy so i'm gonna attempt to make a couple of shims to slide in on this to tighten that up uh we'll see how i make out on that [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] uh so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] do okay that eliminated a lot of the slop in that it's not all gone and it's not the only place but it eliminated a lot of it [Music] ah so wow that oil is pretty black that thing was only finger tight you know people wonder why it costs so much for an excavator this motor takes four and a half gallons of oil it's 85 for the filter and the oil to change your oil on this thing four and a half gallons what we have here is these pads are loose and and what we have to do is there there's this a four-sided knot under here that should fall into a groove and allow me to tighten it up but the problem is they don't so i have to get in there with a wrench which is not easy because a wrench really doesn't want to fit in there so it's a bit of a challenge you can do it i've done a few but um it's not easy so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh okay [Music] all right that one actually caught like it's supposed to tightened up [Music] [Music] now that one actually had a regular nut on it it's a little easier when they have that what i did is i salvaged some handles for the for the track lovers out of jesse's other big machine that's really a part machine and these things threaded onto the rod going down the ones on mine were just the opposite so i found bolts that thread into these i'm going to cut them off shorter i put the two nuts on so i can get the threads back when i'm done and then these [Music] these went on mine so i'll weld these together and i can screw it into mine screw the levers on this and we'll see how that works out [Music] yeah that'll be good [Music] there how's that well there they are screwed on so everybody was worried about me being thrown forward and getting stabbed by these things so now we got these cushion levers up here actually kind of matches to even though it came from a totally different brand machine i couldn't really show it because it was so tight back there but i just bolted in a seat belt so that uh jesse's worried that i'm gonna tip this thing over or something and it's gonna throw me out of it he's probably right so now i have a seat belt okay i'm not done with the excavator i still got some cosmetic stuff to do to it and a couple other little things but i want to try it out i want to want to do some digging with it earlier on we put a electric line down through here and digging that we dug up some old tires and stuff so i'm going to move them out of the way and then fill this in i'm not going to bury these tires okay well i got a conglomeration of stuff here in a way this hose that i need to take off is this one which is way in the back which means i'm going to have to get rid of all this stuff just to get to it which is not going to be easy [Music] all right you [Music] so i was up visiting with andrew the other day and i told him that i i took the seat belt out of this tractor to put it in that excavator he didn't like that idea too much he said i need to need to have one on both so he had this seat belt laying around he gave it to me told me go put it in so that's what i'm doing wow there works like a charm oh [Music] what i'm doing here there's a lever here or there was a lever here that when you lifted lifted it or lowered it would shut the hydraulics off so that if you wanted to get out you could shut the hydraulics off without worrying about hitting something and moving something getting hurt um and it's broke off so i'm i'm gonna divide something else it's gonna be the same principle but um i'm kind of winging it here but i need this working it's too dangerous not to be working so i flattened that out and i hooked it in the back to the rod that goes up and down so now i need to drill a hole here and put a bolt in there which i then can use as a pivot point and i can take this arm and bend it up so i ended up using a solid piece of steel and that uh that turns on and off the controls um so this is the side that was really all beat up and stuff um it's not perfect but it's a lot better than it was okay so what i'm doing here this hole i started digging quite a while ago and it's for the foundation for my house but we uh we had a change of plans and we're going to move it further that way i hadn't wanted to do that because i didn't want to take those trees down but we decided to get it further off of the driveway and move it down that way and we can enter the basement down there in that field um so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take this pile of dirt here that's now in the way and i'm gonna just put it over here in this hole fill this end of the hole in and that way i'll have room to put other stuff and i got to take these trees down i'd rather not have them come over top of these piles of dirt so while i'm doing this mrs w is going to be collecting rocks um for the stone wall over there and uh other places as well so she's gonna be scooting in and out getting rocks as i uncover them so that's the plan and that gives me a chance to get used to this excavator i'm used to backhoe controls and this has cat control so it's a complete opposite so it's going to take a little bit of a learning curve for me to get used to this machine so i figured this is a good place to start [Music] so [Applause] [Music] and the tire [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Applause] [Applause] [Music] so well it was just one of like a big one [Music] so i'm pretty happy with how the excavator came out i think it's going to do a good job for me i still got to get used to running it a little bit with the controls and whatnot and the controls are a little finicky but i'll get it after a while i think it's i think it's going to work out good for me um i got to take those trees down right there there's uh three or four or five trees right there a couple over here and this this one big maple over here that's dead that that'll uh that'll be i'll be doing that soon and once that's done i can start actually excavating the hole so i want to start doing that pretty soon um i've got my i've got my uh sawmill down there way down in the back and you can see uh behind the building i've got a 275 gallon drum for fuel for this machine and i'm going to build a little uh building off the back of that just like a lean-to shed just to help protect it and i can put gas cans and whatnot in there so that that'll be coming up soon too so i think that's as far as i'm gonna go with this video this video is pretty long so i guess i'll see you on the next one oh my goodness they like it they like it a lot good now you get to pick up all the pieces [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Dan Wheeler

Views: 399,149

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Id: k5Sro8iL4ZQ

Length: 92min 46sec (5566 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021