I used to think you had to run the cutter head at full tilt all the time, but a job on the Ohio River last spring made me rethink that.

We were working a stretch with a lot of old timber and debris. Running the head at max RPM just kept jamming everything up and shaking the whole rig. My lead told me to dial it back to about 60% and let the ladder angle do more of the work. It felt wrong at first, like we were wasting time. But we cleared more yardage that day with way less wear on the drive system. Now I'm way more careful about matching the head speed to what's on the bottom. Anyone else adjust their approach based on bottom conditions like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

jones.blake1mo ago

...and that's exactly what I ran into on the Kaskaskia River a few years back. We were dredging a cut near a old bridge and the bottom was just solid clay with random chunks of concrete mixed in. Running the head fast was like trying to blend rocks in a smoothie, everything just bounced and jammed. My old timer said to drop it to like half speed and just let the weight of the ladder do the work. Felt like we were crawling but we actually broke through that stuff way cleaner. The whole drive train stayed cool too which never happens when you're pushing max rpm through hard material. Now I always drop the head speed first when I feel that kind of resistance instead of just trying to power through it.

finley_wells662mo ago

What kind of bottom conditions make you drop the RPMs even lower than that? We hit a patch of pure clay last month that needed a real slow grind.

david_hayes2mo ago

Pure clay's sticky but was it really that bad? Sometimes you just gotta push through it.