Komatsu Dozer gets Cylinder Rebuild. (Long Overdue)

[Music] so [Music] what's up everybody welcome back to diesel creek my name is matt behind me my 1983 komatsu d41a bulldozer i have owned this bulldozer for probably about five maybe six years now and it's been a real good machine but i really haven't used it all that much one of the major reasons for that being that i have been procrastinating about rebuilding the cylinders when i bought the machine that lifting cylinder over there was just pouring hydraulic fluid i mean you'd start the machine up and as soon as you'd lift the blade it would just start dumping fluid out of it so i brought it home and that was the very first thing i did i repacked that cylinder because you couldn't operate the machine you were losing too much hydraulic fluid so i did that and used it around here but all the other cylinders were weeping pretty good too just not quite as bad as that first one so i've used it a few times around here at the farm you've seen videos of it in operation and everything and it is a good it's a pretty darn good machine it's probably the most reliable starting machine that i own so just recently you've seen me clear this entire area here for my new shop build that i'm going to be doing and now i'm ready to strip the topsoil off of this whole thing and start grading it out for the building well i would love to use my bulldozer for that but i don't want to go through 20 gallons of hydraulic oil to do it so we're going to take advantage of this snow day today and start working on fixing up these hydraulic cylinders i guess i've procrastinated long enough five years so what's the first thing we're gonna do here well i did learn from doing this one that the gland nuts on here the part of the cylinder that unthreads right here and comes apart that sucker was on there i ended up having to weld a piece of flat bar onto the nut and then sledgehammer it and that's how i ended up breaking the nut loose i don't have one of the fancy spanner tools to go in there i have a regular spanner wrench but i mean it's nowhere near strong enough to do what was necessary to break that loose so i ended up heating that around there with a torch sledgehammer in it and finally able to break it free that way i fixed one cylinder there's two angle cylinders that need to be rebuilt one more lifting cylinder and the tilt cylinder the tilt cylinder should be the easiest to remove but it's also the one that leaks the worst so that's going to be good to get that all fixed up it's actually leaked so bad people in videos past have thought that the blade is worn out it's actually not the slop that you see in the blade is the air that gets into the cylinder so i know a couple times people commented the blade was wiggling around and it was simply because i hadn't run it through a full range of motion and filled the cylinder back with oil yet so it wiggles like that so let's start with this guy since it's right here in front of us i'm gonna get a bar and you know there is a chance that this one's not gonna be as tight as the other ones but i kind of doubt it but anyways we're going to get a bar and we're going to take a hammer to this thing and see if we can't break that nut loose now of course it goes without saying you have to be super careful working around these chrome surfaces because if you put a ding in that chrome it's going to tear up the seals you're going to have to send that out and get it fixed [Music] nothing well we might as well just go ahead and prep for welding at this point and clean this surface off and uh that would give us something good to weld do [Music] [Music] okay so before we can weld on this cylinder we're gonna go ahead and protect the chrome like i said we're gonna use some aluminum foil here in this case i had pretty good luck with this stuff coming in handy around the shop after recommendations from viewers like you it's uh working pretty good see look at that actually no tape at all you just give it a little twist there and it kind of locks itself onto the cylinder i was going to wrap it with tape but we don't even need it all right that should be plenty of protection for our chrome go ahead and get the water fired up and we can buzz this beater bar on [Applause] okay i didn't even get the tacks done yet i just got a couple sparks going off the rod there and the first couple sparks that hit the aluminum melted right through it so uh i didn't damage the chrome but i definitely don't want to so i'm gonna go ahead and give this another wrap of foil and then a little bit of tape just for added protection [Applause] [Applause] all right well we got the beater bar welded on there pretty good i hope um and while we got some heat from the weld going up into the cylinder i'm going to take a little propane torch and just give it some more heat around this gland and kind of help loosen things up in there hopefully [Music] okay we got a bit of heat in this thing uh i'm just taking it till the paint starts to discolor i i think i overheated that one last time i did this so uh yeah i'll give this good whack and hopefully things loosen up for us nope my weld's breaking [Music] son of a deadly redo go ahead and clean this up and put some more heat in this piece yeah you can see i didn't get much penetration there [Applause] all right fingers crossed here [Music] something happened there we go there we go yep what a pain i hate that that's how we have to do this but uh man i don't know any other way to get them off of there effectively without buying some crazy expensive special tool that i'll probably never need again all right well with our nut broke loose now we don't have the clearance to swing it all the way around here and i want to leave the barrel of the cylinder actually bolted the machine so i'm just going to go ahead and zip that off of there and then once we have the gland nut and the rod off of the machine i can take the real torch and scour that thing off of there without tearing it up and not risking damaging our chrome [Music] [Music] there we go now we use the leftover bar for the next cylinder we need to break loose [Music] now i don't know who the last soul to put these bolts in this machine were but they were good people they put never seas all over everything god i appreciate that you got to watch when you take off uh trunnion caps like this because sometimes they'll have shim packs between the flanges and uh they'll go everywhere if you're not paying attention then you won't know how to re-shim it well i just screwed up here there's a split bearing in here that rides on this uh this cap and i don't remember having this issue with the other cylinder i did but basically the split bearing goes on to this ball in here this chrome ball you can see and these little springs go around the circumference of it and hold them together while you assemble this and when i just pulled this cylinder up off of this thing the springs kind of sprung and now i'm gonna need new springs probably but there's little grease seals in there and that helps you keep grease inside of this ball and socket set up which uh is a nice design there we go yeah i'm pretty sure when i took the other side apart this thing just stayed together down here and didn't get stuck in the uh in the cylinder like that just did but oh well i really didn't hurt anything it's just these stupid little springs you know you could probably get by without them so i just went and grabbed a whole pile of pig mats here because we're probably going to need them when we take the cylinder apart what's going on in here is this whole body of the cylinder is full of oil whole body of the cylinder is full of hydraulic oil you know that's what pushes the rod in and out so when we take this cap off of here it's probably going to pour out hydraulic fluid there is a slight chance that it's all leaked out since it's been sitting here i mean it's definitely leaked some but highly unlikely that there's none in there so trying to be prepared try to catch all that hard to do all right well hopefully i can kind of control the oil when it starts to come out here now and it won't be like that drain plug was in the uh transmission on the fat alice loader like it gonna be packed wowzers couldn't find a little bucket this will do all right not too bad wow yeah really wasn't much left in there at all most of the uh most of the hydraulic fluid has apparently leaked out it's been sitting a while the packing itself in here doesn't look too awful bad it's probably just the gland seals here in the end that we need to worry about maybe not that [Music] [Music] that bugger's on there somebody gave me some sage-like advice one time they said matt don't force it get a bigger hammer man that's incredible we need heat there we go man that's incredible what a little propane torch will do that bugger would not move and i was hitting it for well maybe not all i was worth but all life was comfortable hitting a little bit of heat with propane torch spin right off there look at that there we go so [Music] that there's one pin right out and two i'm impressed at how easy this came out there we go now i took this one out because i still can't get the gland in to spin that easily and i was out of swing in here i couldn't i was hitting up against this thing so hopefully we can just chain this thing down to the truck or something or put a bar through the end here and we'll be able to spin this eye off now oh yeah there she goes [Music] ugh and we're back i did exactly what i didn't want to do and got squirted in the face with hydraulic oil it's always something come on why all right well this cylinder's got me in a position that i really don't like to be in and that is out of options so there's a bunch of debris down in here now from me using a soft blow hammer beating on this thing trying to knock the body down off of the ram here but i think i figured out the problem you see how the paint's all missing around here and you know it's all the way around the barrel there and it's got some heavy weld right in this area right here it's kind of smudged over with grease right now you can see it's been ground on and everything else and while it's not a bad weld i highly doubt that it's a factory weld so what i think happened is at some point that had cracked in there and a welder just came and buzzed it up right on the machine without disassembling the cylinder or anything which is fine until you're me and you're trying to take this thing apart and what happens when you weld an area like that is the the heat after it cools it constricts and it shrinks and now this is such a tight tolerance in these cylinders that the ram is too big to fit through that part of the bore so it has to be fixed i really don't know any other way at this point to get that apart other than to like really force it and i thought about you know hooking the hydraulic line up to in it and and pressurizing it and just blowing it apart that way but that is going to be a god-awful environmental disaster i mean there's going to be fluid everywhere if i do that so yeah i'm pretty much thinking almost the setup i got there i'm going to connect the cylinder to the boom and to the blade and yeah i i don't like it i'm not proud of it but i just don't know what else to do at this point i don't know of any other way to get it apart i'd like to reiterate i don't like this idea i just don't have any other ones broke my strap good golly that put up a fight all right so here it is we managed to get it apart there without damaging anything you can see the packing does have a little bit of a line here i'm not sure if that's where or you know maybe that's from getting galled on the way out i don't know but other than that everything looks to be in good shape inside the barrel here hopefully you guys can see there's kind of some marks right here and over here and in a couple other places around the bore where you can see it was just super tight when it pulled out of there but luckily no harm i don't really know other than take some scotch brite to that i really don't know what else to do about that it's just going to be really tight there i guess i can actually feel with my hands there's a ridge in there um probably presumably where they welded it so we got it apart but now i'm worried about getting it back together so i might take this barrel down to the hydraulic shop when i go for the seal kits and ask them what they could do about that because it's pretty bad it's pretty substantial so here are where things get a little bit more interesting on this machine uh to have access to the retainer pins that hold the angle cylinders onto the the dozer frame you can't get at them the way the blade sits right now so you have the idler here that's holding up the track blocking your access to it from the outside even if you could get it to it from the outside you have nowhere to go if you'd want to drive the pin outwards which would be your only option from this side you would just drive it straight into the side of the dozer here so what i'm going to have to do is i had to remove these engine covers and then there's a couple covers that cover over top of the lines and the cylinders here and to get those off you have to lift up the blade all the way up and then you'll have clearance here to work behind this cover and we'll be able to remove this cover and then i hope we'll have access to drive the pin outwards into the engine area here [Music] there we go well not what i wanted to see down here these hydraulic lines are looking pretty rough but at the same time man hydraulic lines are so expensive i really hate to replace them before they blow this machine doesn't get taken to a lot of job sites and it definitely doesn't seem any high stress environments so i think i'm just going to ignore those for now and replace them as they blow they may last another five years like that it's hard to say but at any rate we do have to knock the lines loose here off of the cylinder and uh remove it because there's no way to loosen the flange off the face of this thing without removing it from the frame here so so i'm sure you guys can hear on camera it kind of sounds like it's raining what it actually is is we had an ice storm a few days ago and the ice is just now starting to come out of the trees with the sun hitting it and man it is beautiful out here i'm finding it hard to actually stay working because it's just beautiful i could sit here and watch this all day i actually did an entire drone video just flying around and uh admiring admiring the ice so if you guys want to see that there's a link in the description it's an unlisted video but i figured there was definitely some of you that would appreciate it so back to this cylinder now to remove this pin here is the same thing on all the pins you got two keeper bolts and a little plate here we'll pull that out and we're gonna drive this pin straight through this way and it's just gonna barely miss right here [Music] okay i think this thing should just slide out of here well if only i had a crane huh now trouble is i can't get it in here right now one of the things i'm hoping to have in my new shop when i build it here is a rail crane that runs end to end in the building and that's would be perfect for doing stuff like this there we go my lord so so that is a bit ridiculous finally holy crap so i don't know if you guys were paying attention to how i had this thing chained down on the machine here but i had this bar through the other end and i had it so that it would you know keep the cylinder from rocking kind of as an outrigger and uh man i didn't think it was possible but actually bent this thing this isn't just a hunk of mild steel either this is a half of an old pry bar so this is some good steel there we go that was an endeavor huh where'd you go bubba who's a good puppy oscar's good puppy yeah yeah i'm all greasy buddy daddy's got to get this cylinder apart meatball down there waiting waiting patiently for his bowl anyways this is the uh the setup i've got here to try and bust these loose i already tried the impact it wouldn't touch them so got a cheater pipe thank goodness well when they go they go all right well we're back out here been several days later usually i can get these uh parts in pretty darn quickly for whatever reason these ones took a little while but uh we should have all of our packing here to redo all the cylinders we're going to take the grinder cut off these bars that we had to weld on there grind that up make it look nice but we'll do that with the gland end completely off the rod so that we don't risk damaging the chrome this is the angle cylinder this is the one that was welded and shrunk on us that we had such a difficult time getting part and what they ended up doing i'm sure you probably can't tell i mean there's really nothing to see but they machine that out they put this thing up in the lathe and machine that back down to where it's supposed to be and then put a nice hone on it for us so we should be back in business there but also told me that the cylinder is uh still not a hundred percent true the cylinder is actually bent in some manner i'm not positive how that could be but uh yeah so i don't know how you would ever damage this cylinder it's really not in a position to be uh have a lot of force put on it but obviously somebody did over the years other than that this machine's in in good shape i mean it doesn't look like this thing's been abused look at that [Music] we'll take the flap disc and clean that up now [Music] so [Music] see this was probably a lot of the reason it was leaking right there is this gland seal the uh it's actually a wiper seal see how that all just turned super brittle and fell apart that's uh that's not good that was a lot of our issue here just got crispy yep same thing down here on the actual ceiling the pressure seal down here i don't know what this material is made of it reminds me of the same stuff that uh snowmobile uh gears and stuff are made of like the track drive gears but it gets super brittle and just starts falling apart at a certain point okay well this project has ended up taking a bit longer than i uh initially anticipated so we are a few days later one of the things people compliment me on all the time is my ability to uh take things apart leave them apart for a long time and then put them back together and know where all the pieces go well it's not that i'm that smart folks i i promise you i'm not uh it's it's all about following evidence so i i forgot which order these seals go you know these all go in a certain way otherwise this isn't going to work some of it's self-explanatory you know the wiper goes out at the end you know it's just looking at them you can tell but so these two these two actually these two go in the same fit down in here on the gland end and i couldn't remember you know the wider part of your seal always faces the fluid so that's just general knowledge but i couldn't remember if it's stacked that way in there or opposite and all you gotta do is follow the evidence and look all right i think you guys can see you can see this narrow ring down in here and then from here up is you know clearly a different piece so the thinner ring goes down lower towards the bottom and then the blue seal goes on top of that so it stacks like that so of course working with hydraulic seals these are all really really really tight fit you've got to be careful not to damage them or pinch them or anything it's warmer today luckily which makes this a bit easier but trying to do it in the cold you know it's it's really tough i actually had them heating up on the floor of the truck the other day with the anticipation of putting them together and ended up working on something else but uh yeah so just gonna work them in there incrementally and uh just be careful don't force anything [Music] looking around and getting a little bit resourceful we now have the proper seal driver all right she is rebuilt the people more familiar with uh rebuilding this stuff will notice that i did not remove the actual steel bushings that get pushed in to here and the reason i didn't do that is because i can see like the original factory uh finish on the inside of them all the way around they look beautiful i don't see any wear on them whatsoever [Music] i don't want to call it knurling but there's like you can just see a very slight well i guess it is a knurl all the way around the inside so there's no wear because if there was anywhere at all it would have worn that off so i'm going to leave them in there and that saves me a heap of work plus they're sometimes difficult to get out so now it's time to rebuild these so i'm gonna spray them down first make sure i get all the dirt off of them and then we'll go ahead and install some seals now you put the layered rings that holds everything in place [Music] there we go that sucker is tight last spacer ring and wamo she's rebuilt nothing really to these things unless they're scarring on the chrome or in the bore i don't understand why people pay to get these things rebuilt they're pretty darn simple i don't know that you have to but i'm gonna clock the seams on these spacer rings just like piston rings on an engine i don't think it matters on here but just makes me sleep at night easier keep going until it quits how do i go back push it oh well i didn't wear the right shoes for this place i gotta hold her on there well then how do you want me to learn if you're not telling me the right things to do but you don't use two hands you keep one here right there's no easier way to do this i'm not making any progress you're setting me up for failure oh well then i can do that let me do that no i can't do that how do you make it look so easy this is serious i am struggling am i done or it has to be right on it does it have to be ready okay i'll keep going [Music] what's this a saturday video or well it's torqued why didn't you guys speak up and say something you saw me doing it oh i don't think it's the first time probably won't be the last [Music] hey you got to be careful when you're putting these together you're going to make sure you're not going on an angle or getting things crooked okay so i don't have any kind of way to actually torque this thing uh and i don't know the specs even if i did have a way so i just hammered it until it's lined up here i'll put a paint mark across that thing and then that's something i can reference and if it ever moves i can be sure i take care of it well real quick i just want to address my screw up in the video which the astute of you will no doubt notice i am but mere mortal which means i make mistakes and in this video i put the pistons on the rods backwards on three out of four cylinders that i rebuilt which while it's not good i don't see how it's going to hurt anything i don't see what it affects the cylinders still perform as they should and maybe somebody that's smarter than me can tell me why that's going to be a big issue in the comments but i don't think it will be and i didn't notice that i did it until they were all completely back together and assembled and on the dozer full of fluid so yeah they're going to stay that way unless it causes some sort of issue and yeah i i screwed up look at that the old komatsu wants it she loves it come on baby [Music] uh okay we got the three cylinders that we worked on all uh hooked back up the lines are connected everything's ready to go but i still have one angle cylinder to do over there and the reason i haven't done it with the rest of them is just because it's hard to get in over there and work where the machine's parked at so i should be able to fire it up lift the blade up go out spin it around and it's going to get covered in mud because it's been a rain day today but then i'm going to bring it back in here and we'll put that angle cylinder up here where it's easy to work on and i can stay further away from the end of the building here so i don't get rained on contact so so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] got everything back together let's try it out so [Music] so as you can see it's just an absolute mess out here today weather only fit for a duck but we did a good thing today we actually got something accomplished look at that beautiful no oil for the first time since i've owned this machine all the cylinders are nice and dry don't have oil dripping out of them everywhere everything looks really good and why have i put that repair off for so long well i really can't answer that i don't have any good excuses mainly it's just not a fun job i think i really do not like doing those um but you got to do what you got to do so i needed the machine i didn't want to be dumping oil everywhere just because it's wasteful and it's bad for the environment so believe it or not even though i'm playing around with big diesel stuff all the time i actually do kind of have a soft spot for you know mother nature that's why i'm out here but uh so we got that thing fixed up right now but anyways we got it all fixed up and hopefully we're not gonna be losing any oil anytime soon well i really wanted to end this video pushing dirt off into the sunset but uh hey it's way too cloudy to see the sun b mother nature has just not cooperated today it has been pouring down rain all day finally caught a little bit of a dry spell here uh raid is i'm finishing up this project but it's definitely way too wet to be shoving dirt around i'm just going to make a big mess and cause myself headaches down the line i would just wait a day and film tomorrow shoving around a little bit of a dirt for you guys but i have to have this finished film today so that i can edit it tonight because tomorrow i'm actually leaving to go out of state for a while on a trip and uh i don't want to leave you guys without a video for a week so even though you didn't get to see any action in this video just straight mechanical work if you like the video don't forget do me a favor hit the thumbs up button it doesn't cost you guys a thing and be sure you're subscribed so that you can see this thing in action very very soon as always guys thanks for watching and i'll catch you on the next one [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Diesel Creek

Views: 849,931

Keywords: komatsu, D41, D31, D51, D41a, bulldozer, dozer, heavy, equipment, machinary, blade, rebuild, DIY, hydraulic, cylinder, seal, packing, kit

Id: RxtWEYWQ_0c

Length: 51min 35sec (3095 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 26 2022