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My cutterhead started vibrating after running fine for 8 hours | Dredge Operators - Thought Shares

My cutterhead started vibrating after running fine for 8 hours

I was working a job in Baton Rouge last week, clearing out a drainage canal with a 12-inch cutterhead. About 8 hours in, the whole thing started shaking real bad and I had to shut it down. Turns out one of the teeth had snapped off and the imbalance was wrecking the bearings. I learned to check every single tooth before a long shift now, not just glance at them. Has anyone else dealt with a sudden vibration like that on a long job?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancyj113mo ago

@spencer981 I gotta say I respectfully disagree with running a cutterhead with a missing tooth for half a day. I did that once on a job in Mississippi and wound up replacing the whole bearing housing plus the seal because the vibration worked its way through. Let me tell you that bill was way bigger than stopping to swap a tooth. A little vibration is fine for maybe an hour but eight hours straight you're just asking for a breakdown. What I do now is keep a spare set of teeth in a bucket with the locking pins already started so I can swap a bad one in under five minutes. It saves you the downtime and keeps your bearings happy.

spencer9813mo ago

Eight hours of steady work and you're surprised a tooth snapped? That's pretty standard for a cutterhead that size, especially in drainage work where you're hitting crap you can't see. A little vibration isn't the end of the world unless you let it go too long. I've run them with a missing tooth for half a day before and the bearings held up fine. You might be overthinking this one, it's not like the head was about to fly apart or anything.

victor_robinson3mo ago

Yeah I read something a while back from a guy who worked on the Mississippi river barges and he said the same thing about checking teeth before every shift. He said a missing tooth creates a harmonic vibration that's way worse than just a little wiggle. Once that harmonic gets going it'll shake the whole drivetrain apart real fast. I remember he had a picture of a cutterhead that threw a tooth and the whole shaft was bent like a pretzel by the time they got it shut down. Makes me wonder if these newer cutterheads are built lighter than the old ones and can't take the abuse anymore.