We BREAK Everything On Our BULLDOZER (Not Good)

we bought a giant bulldozer to fix our road and just when we felt like we were getting the hang of it we threw a track this was like the gut punch that maybe we needed after a few days of creative rigging we've got the track back on and we're ready to tackle this project but i'm not so sure that the dozer is as ready as we are another day another broken dozer [Music] i made it through oh my gosh this machine is insane [Music] i found that they're not really pep talks that i have to come give riley they're like anti-pep talks he gets really excited and he gets that adrenaline going and that's when mistakes happen so he'll text me that it's going really well and then i'll come out and i congratulate him but then i also remind him that slow is smooth and smooth is fast he's giggling at me right now [Music] another day another broken dozer the tilt cylinder just kind of fell off of the blade this has been repaired before there's a big steel plate though that is now missing it's buried somewhere i just went on a wild goose chase in town trying to find a big tap and some big bolts to put this back together didn't have any luck and then i realized i can just weld it it's gonna be a short-term fix i'm probably gonna have to put this back together again another time but it's gonna get us going again and back on the road project step one is to get to the shop where we can use our new power system to power the welder [Music] [Music] i think that's where it fits the best and we're gonna weld her in and see how we do the welder is like a foot and a half from being able to reach so i need an extension cord i don't have one i know the sun's still out but it's like eight o'clock i am exhausted so i think that uh i'm gonna call it quits for tonight trying to get this done tonight would only mean sloppy work it's not like i'm gonna be able to do more dozing tonight anyways so we'll see you bright and early tomorrow and get this repair done well good morning everyone it turns out i probably should have worked late last night because now it's raining [Music] i think on my short list of projects for once we get the shop set up it's going to be to build like an off-road cart for this welder because i've been using it outside way more than i ever expected to today i'm going to be welding on 240 volts for the very first time with this welder and i'm really looking forward to seeing what it can do [Music] whew all right i got a solid bead on it now i'm going to put this 3 8 piece of plate over it [Music] this is our miller multimatic 220. it's an ac and dc tig welder a mig welder and a stick welder all in one machine and it runs on either 110 or 240 volts which makes it super versatile for like big welding projects small small welding projects and everything in between you know i'm super comfortable with a mig welder but a stick while they're not so much so i think that while the stick welding might have been the better process for the job the mig welding was the better process for me until i get some more practice on stick welding okay so here's what i came up with lots of welding lots of gussets what do you guys think is it going to hold up drop it in the comments below it's either going to hold up or it's going to break on the very first push of dirt i really hope it holds up because i don't want to have to cut all of that off and figure out something else if you're interested in how in the world we're able to power a 240 foot welder off-grid well here's the answer this is our off-grid power setup from current connected two 10 000 watt victron inverters 60 kw of lithium batteries and a whole bunch of solar panels if you want to learn more about this setup check out the link to that video in the description below it's a cloudy rainy day so we're not getting much solar right now and all of that welding i just did used three percent of our battery we could do a lot of welding [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's a wrap on the dozer for today but so far everything seems to be working correctly and that's awesome so my repair on the tilt cylinder work the tracks are staying on it and i think we're gonna get a lot more done on this road in the next couple of days i cannot believe how many rocks i just moved out of there this plan is gonna work [Music] [Applause] [Music] a few weeks ago we installed the ecoflow power kit on our army truck and we told you guys that we had a reason that we were gonna need that much power and today we're going to show you exactly why it's time to transform our 1994 student stephenson m1078 into the ultimate mobile work truck step one is to mount the toolbox [Music] now that we own a bulldozer and it breaks a lot we found that we have a need to be able to service things not just when they're at the shop but also when they break down the road or maybe on someone else's property so what we're using to weld today is the ecofoot power kit the power kit is a complete all-in-one power system that includes a dc-dc charger solar charger controllers inverters and batteries this power kit is designed to be used in rvs vans small off-grid cabins but we have it here on our army truck and it's going to be the powerhub central for our service truck our batteries in here are currently only at 13 we've intentionally let them run down because we want to test a few of the charge features today [Music] all right let's see what this power kit can do [Music] they actually have this really cool app so we can also monitor our power consumption and power levels remotely all right this is the first attempt welding with our ecofoot power kit i'm pretty excited at how well this test is going because this means that we're going to be able to use this welder anywhere on the property to accomplish projects without having to do a whole bunch of setup and dragging equipment around the inverter built into the power hub on the ecoflow power kit has a 3600 watt maximum output which gives it plenty of capacity to power super high demanding tools like this welder or big sauce [Music] nice job thank you we took a quick break from working on things because some of our favorite people were about to arrive once we got them up the hill in their two-wheel drive motorhome it was back to work the girls are upstairs in the air conditioning playing with charlie but i've got tyler here and we're gonna get this done this truck likes to leave us with surprises this is today's surprise luckily we've got power for the shop vac right here in the truck so let's get to cleaning we're just using three wire extension cord for this that's going to give us one wire for ground one wire for switch 12 volt and one wire for constant 12 volt [Music] the power kit comes with these ferrule ends and the crimp tool you need for terminating these to make nice connections on all these wires on the dc power side there are six switch circuits and six constant circuits so the wire running to the box we have one for ground one for switched and one for constant one thing i want to note about our installation is that ecoflow did reach out to us and they recommended that we move our power hub so there's at least four inches of clearance on the back between it and the wall for ventilation with the fans i'm gonna slide this forward and make sure we have the proper ventilation of course no good work truck would be complete without some serious work lighting so we're going to install some light bars on this thing but rather than install them into the trucks electrical system we're going to hook them up to the power kit that's going to let us run these lights all night long if we need to without concern of draining the truck's batteries [Music] after using all this power for powering our tools and stuff we've gone from twelve percent charge to four percent charge so it's time to get some charge in this thing and we're going to test all the different inputs so about 500 watts of alternator charge at 12 volts so now that we're charging the system on 24 volts from the ultimate interval i would get about twice as much charge in it that's because you're able to run more power at 24 volts than 12 volts through the same size wire for that exact same reason the batteries in the system actually run at 48 volts which means that all of the cabling from the batteries to the power hub can also be a lot smaller than if they were to say 12 volts this is the ecoflow smart generator that you've already seen us using with our delta pro but it also works with the power kit and so we're going to test that out so as soon as i hook this up in theory the generator will start let's find out oh it's starting one of the downsides to living in a forest is that our solar panels are often shaded so right now the panels on the army truck are fully shaded and they're not producing any power luckily we have portable solar panels so i'm gonna hook up a few portable panels stick them out in the sun and see what kind of charge we can get out of the second solar input i've got the alternator the solar panels and the smart generator all going at once and we have 2 700 watts of power coming in this is going to mean that we're going gonna be fully charged in just an hour and a half all right well i think that's all that's left with this project is to test the lights tonight once it's dark and get this toolbox loaded up with tools it's gonna make so many things so much easier on this property to be able to pull up with all the tools and supplies we need to get a project or job or repair done okay you guys can't see me but i'm sitting in the army truck and we're about to test the lights for the first time there are six switched outputs this should be the front light bar wow that's bright the side lights oh yeah oh my gosh it's so much light so from a full charge we should able to run these lights for more than 10 hours off this power kit which means that we'll be able to work on projects all night long and it's not really that i'm hoping that something's gonna break so we get to use this but i'm definitely looking forward to getting to use this truck to learn more about the ecoflow power kit and to customize your own configuration head to the link in the description below and thanks again to ecoflow for sponsoring this video started shaking hopped off to investigate it i don't know what's going on all right well i found a broken bolt and some needle bearings over there in the dirt not a good sign i'm gonna take these floor pans off and hopefully it'll let me see what's going on down underneath there oh broken u-joint i don't know if you guys can see right there broken u-joint a big thanks to courtney for making the trip down to spokane to pick up these parts from the cat dealer and a huge thanks to western state's cat for getting these parts to us overnight i think we're gonna have the stoves repaired by the end of the day [Music] you can see down here there's a u-joint that's falling apart i hope it'd help if i turned it the right way huh this one's not tight at all [Music] oh yeah there we go it's moving [Music] this one was definitely a little bit stripped good thing i bought a tap oh that's heavy [Music] all right got it out for reference these things are huge it also appears that that bolt is broken too so at a minimum i'm making a run to the hardware store for a new bolt so as best i can figure out the previous owner of this bulldozer told me that the transmission had gone out on him he sourced a used transmission paid a mechanic to put it in for him and that was pretty shortly before i bought it so i don't think that the bolts that hold these u-joints in were ever fully tightened and once they started backing out then two of them broke and it was all downhill from there you can see here so this is the yoke that goes on the torque converter side and these are the u-joints that you joints attached to the yoke and you can see here there are two broken bolts and these bolts were barely finger tight so once this thing started backing out then all this stuff could rattle the bolts broke and there was nothing holding it in anymore i had western cat go ahead and throw a new bolt kit in with the u-joint so i'd have new bolts for that part but now that i have it out i've decided to replace all of the hardware so i'm going to run to town pick up some grade 8 bolts and i think we'll be back on this road project by the end of the day [Music] no way oh it turned [Music] next step is to clean up all these old threads before we put this thing back together oh there's a broken bolt in there never mind the next step is to do more investigating if i'm this far i think i might as well oh i dropped a piece [Music] torque to ft [Music] i don't actually know how to get this in there [Music] all right i just got this side to fall into place i'm gonna put a bolt in it then i'm gonna put a bolt on that side and flip it around i have been fighting this thing for probably about two hours now and i just got it to tap into place tyler's already getting started on the mountain bike trail system [Applause] tyler already found a use for the mobile work truck his chainsaw battery died and we're getting it charged up there it goes i want to give a huge shout out to jose thank you so much for sending us the stewart and stevenson badge for our truck it's awesome hey guys i think riley has been having a little bit of fun lately and there is a wake of destruction following him around we want to be able to drive my car in and out so i'm going to get to work doing a little bit of cleanup today to try to get this section of road passable so we can keep driving this way [Music] do [Music] we drove the new road for the first time last night and it was very rough it's just funny how from up on the dozer it looks pretty smooth not smooth so courtney's going around smoothing things out i am back to working on the dozer again today trying to keep up on the maintenance on this thing so that it doesn't give us more problems down the road last night i operated it for about 45 minutes or an hour after getting that u-joint all fixed up and there were some problems so the main problem is that the transmission kept kicking itself into neutral which is really a problem when you're up on a hill and you need that thing in gear and need to be able to switch to reverse kicking it into neutral then i couldn't get it into reverse which is a common symptom on these of low hydraulic fluid in the transmission case so i kept adding more fluid to the transmission i read online that i should overfill it by five gallons so i over filled the transmission then i started getting a big oil leak which kind of scared me the machine wasn't quite running right i was having some weird problems i decided that it would be a good idea to check the magnetic screen and transmission oil filters i have new filters i bought from cat we're gonna go and get those swapped in and make sure the screen is clean i've already pulled it out check out what i found so here's where the filter came from and this is what it looks like this is one of those blue shop rags fully restricting the flow and it is covered that's not good not good at all all that metal has me pretty concerned the previous owner of this machine broke the transmission and put a used transmission in it pretty much right before we bought it and seeing that rag in there makes me suspicious that they ever cleaned that filter i think that all of that metal is from the old broken transmission not the new one hopefully that screen and the filter did its job and we haven't sent all that metal back through the entire hydraulic system i'm gonna get all this cleaned up get those filters changed and then i'll be keeping an eye on that screen very often to make sure that we don't have continued metal buildup this is crazy i can't believe there's an entire shop rag shoved inside this thing if any of you have tips on a better way to clean these magnetic filters drop in the comments below because this isn't working that well courtney just sent me a fingers crossed so here we go [Music] well that is a relief it seems to be running totally normally now the weird problems i was having yesterday that had to do with the way it was shifting and stuff are are gone at least for now i think i'm gonna run it for about an hour get it warmed up and see what it's looking like i got it up here on level ground so i can check all the fluids while it's level [Music] is [Music] [Music] it's another day back on the dozer i've got some new ideas today on how to fix this weird shifting problem where uh basically after running the thing for about 30 minutes it won't shift out of neutral and it also feels super low on power i'm gonna check some more filters and screens and see if i can find a clog somewhere in the hydraulic system despite our setbacks with this dozer we've gotten an incredible amount done i don't i don't know if you can tell but this road behind me is almost 20 feet wide now it used to be super narrow kind of off camera wanted to slide you off the hill on down the cliff now it's one a lot less steep and two a lot wider and then the third thing we've done is that it the old road used to go down this hill way down down there and then kind of go around that turn and come back uphill we've shortcut that and now we just come straight down and over here so we've a lot less distance a lot less steep and a lot wider so kind of my suspicion is that the torque converter housing is getting overfilled with oil which could either be that there's a clog somewhere in the hydraulic system that's not allowing the oil to get pumped back out of that housing or the scavenge pump that's supposed to pump the oil is not working right or worst case scenario the torque converter is cracked i'm a little bit worried that the torque converter could be cracked as a result of that u-joint braking and rattling it really bad i hope not because that's like a big project a big repair a lot of expense and not really something that i was hoping to have to tackle i don't actually know what to expect out here okay oh my gosh it is filthy down here i think i found another one of those magnetic screens up here under the torque converter but it looks like i have to drain the torque inverter first so oh okay well it wasn't frozen oh yeah i'm about to take a bath guys [Music] [Applause] this time i will be a little more ready the good news is actually this magnet is somewhat clean and there's definitely some stuff on it but oh man [Applause] okay there is definitely some junk in here oh where'd that spring come from how does a leaf get in here i've done a bunch of research online and i'm going to try to test this so here's what i've been reading online about this test my problem is probably either the scavenge pump or the torque converter either the torque convertors crack or the scavenge pump isn't keeping up with the fluid coming into the torque converter and returning to the transmission i'm gonna fire up the tractor i'm gonna stall out the torque converter using the brake pedal and i'm gonna wait and see what happens after one minute if i have about two gallons of fluid it's probably the scavenge pump not keeping up if i have like five or more gallons of fluid come out then it's probably a cracked torque converter overloading the scavenge pump's capability we're about to find out i'm hoping for a scavenge pump because that's going to be a lot less expensive and a lot easier of a repair but i'm a little bit nervous that it's the torque converter magneto on choke on i don't know if i did that right that is a full bucket that means it's the torque converter dang it dang it dang it this kind of feels like opening a present that i don't want to open because i mean we want answers but also they could be really bad answers

Channel: Ambition Strikes

Views: 380,142

Keywords: off-grid barndominium, diy pole barn, diy truck camper, couple builds rv, diy snow tracks, husband and wife build, off grid home build, couple builds dream home, building our off grid home, heavy equipment, bulldozer, catd8, d8h, d8 bulldozer, cat d8

Id: S_GplkVxKWc

Length: 28min 33sec (1713 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 14 2022