Check the pony oil every time before use. The rear crankshaft seal, IF leaking goes into the Pinion area and you don't see the oil leaking. Oil level can be fine one day, then the next time you start it 2 months later, oil is gone. By, By crank. Don't ask how I know this. What serial # is your 12? Add to list;; grease the pilot bearing on the flywheel. If you cant lift the front end with the blade , you may want to remove the bull gear covers on the lift arms and turn the gears 1/3 turn. Will not kick when gears are right.

"BigAgCat" wrote:

Sometimes a grinding starter is a result of a low battery.

This is also a possibility. No battery in the unit, so I'm attaching two sets of jumper cables to the lug on the starter, one from each of the batteries in my truck. Probably a little less cranking voltage than a battery under the floor, but given that this is actually a 6v starter, I bet it's getting more voltage than it was designed to operate with... I think it needs a cleaning and lube...

"oldbeek" wrote:

Check the pony oil every time before use. The rear crankshaft seal, IF leaking goes into the Pinion area and you don't see the oil leaking. Oil level can be fine one day, then the next time you start it 2 months later, oil is gone. By, By crank. Don't ask how I know this. What serial # is your 12? Add to list;; grease the pilot bearing on the flywheel. If you cant lift the front end with the blade , you may want to remove the bull gear covers on the lift arms and turn the gears 1/3 turn. Will not kick when gears are right.

Good to know. I finally found the dipstick on the pony before I started it last time. It was all good. Before that, we checked it with a wire poked down through the oil fill port just be be sure something was in it.

This grader is S/N8T15562. Just a few units before the wet clutch.
It also has a scarifier with most of the teeth still present, and what I think is OE power steering. Cab with heater and almost all of the glass intact.

I'll add the throw out bearing to my list of to-do's. Operator/Maint manual should be here today, and I'm sure that will help a lot!!

I need to see why the trans shift is so sloppy too. On my old SM465, there was a roll pin that wore out in the top cover. I believe this trans shifts through a linkage, so perhaps just sloppy linkage pivots... I haven't really looked at all.

I have not tried to lift the front with the blade, but I did get decent down pressure on the blade before the dogs wanted to kick out. Will turning the bull gears help keep the dogs engaged?

Thanks for all your help!
Lots to do, but building my house comes first, so I'm just making a list that the other guys here can go through while I'm busy.

"Neil" wrote:

Voltage is important but more important is amps - if your jumper cables or the connection that they're making isn't adequate, then you're still constrained. If you can put a battery in it, and add jumper cables from the truck, and your existing cables in the machine are adequate, then you can rule battery capacity out. I had "regular" car size cables on my D2 with 6 volts - good starter and excellent battery. Cranked like a piece of junk. Fitted 2/0 cables with clean, bright connections - cranks like you'd hope/expect it to - same starter, same battery.

Yup. Possible that cranking amps are a bit inadequate off the jumper cables, but I'm sure the starter needs love too.

The existing positive battery cable is like 1/0, which is needed with 6v, as it takes twice the amperage when you only have half the voltage. I imagine once we get a decent battery in it, with a heavy ground cable too, I won't have to use any jumper cables. Gotta see what size 12v battery I can cram in the tiny little battery box under the floor... It's got a 12v alternator scabbed on above the 6v generator, which I'm hopeful we can get to work. It appears to be a single wire alternator, and there's an "alternator" on/off switch on the gauge panel.

"1stDeuce" wrote:

This is also a possibility. No battery in the unit, so I'm attaching two sets of jumper cables to the lug on the starter, one from each of the batteries in my truck. Probably a little less cranking voltage than a battery under the floor, but given that this is actually a 6v starter, I bet it's getting more voltage than it was designed to operate with... I think it needs a cleaning and lube...




Good to know. I finally found the dipstick on the pony before I started it last time. It was all good. Before that, we checked it with a wire poked down through the oil fill port just be be sure something was in it.

This grader is S/N8T15562. Just a few units before the wet clutch.
It also has a scarifier with most of the teeth still present, and what I think is OE power steering. Cab with heater and almost all of the glass intact.

I'll add the throw out bearing to my list of to-do's. Operator/Maint manual should be here today, and I'm sure that will help a lot!!

I need to see why the trans shift is so sloppy too. On my old SM465, there was a roll pin that wore out in the top cover. I believe this trans shifts through a linkage, so perhaps just sloppy linkage pivots... I haven't really looked at all.

I have not tried to lift the front with the blade, but I did get decent down pressure on the blade before the dogs wanted to kick out. Will turning the bull gears help keep the dogs engaged?

Thanks for all your help!
Lots to do, but building my house comes first, so I'm just making a list that the other guys here can go through while I'm busy.

.

Lots of guys tear into the blade controls to try to fix the kicking. The real problem is the big driven gear is worn out. That is what causes the binding. Somewhere along the line, cat put 3 keyways on the shaft where the lift arms attach. IF yours has that, just look at the keyways. Do they show wear as a key has been there in the past. ( of coarse folks love to paint over these machines) 3 key machines , you just remove the arm and turn it 1/3. If not 3 keyways, the whole gear housings to be pulled off the cab Attaching bolts removed and gear turned. Took me 3 days because many of the studs broke off the box. The collar on the shaft with set screw that holds shaft in place can tell a story also. Loosen that set screw and pull the collar forward. How many set screw marks do you see on the shaft? That can tell you how many times the box has been apart. The worm gear also has an adjustment procedure. Those shifters are sloppy by design. Just tighten it up as much as possible. 4 cap screws on top of the casting that retains the shift handle come loose. Major slop then. Easy fix.

"1stDeuce" wrote:

Yup. Possible that cranking amps are a bit inadequate off the jumper cables, but I'm sure the starter needs love too.

The existing positive battery cable is like 1/0, which is needed with 6v, as it takes twice the amperage when you only have half the voltage. I imagine once we get a decent battery in it, with a heavy ground cable too, I won't have to use any jumper cables. Gotta see what size 12v battery I can cram in the tiny little battery box under the floor... It's got a 12v alternator scabbed on above the 6v generator, which I'm hopeful we can get to work. It appears to be a single wire alternator, and there's an "alternator" on/off switch on the gauge panel.

Flipping an alternator hot wire off while it is running can cause the alternator to produce extreme voltage and explode the diodes. Pm me if you need more help.

Thanks again oldbeek.

We're on to bigger and better things... First up is the steering slop. I got a parts manual, but it says nothing of a bushing at the lower end of the steering shaft... It does show that the shaft on power steering graders is 1pc, vs. 2pc on manual graders, but it's pretty obvious that there should be a bushing in the frame right above the steering arm, and this one is SHOT. The steering arm is also loose on the shaft, but it appears that's a tapered spline fit, so hopefully we'll be able to tighten the nut up and take that slop out, if it's not destroyed...

All the pivots at the steering arm are sloppy... Probably need to take all of that apart and see what's bushable or replaceable. Gotta get the steering slop down to less than 1 full turn...

And I'm starting to build my house now, so we'll get the grader projects done a little at a time...

Well, I and several others met this morning to do some work to the grader. We greased a LOT of fittings, and found several that we'll have to replace. I greased a fitting on top of the bellhousing, but couldn't see what to grease when I pulled the side cover, so I'll consult the manual and revisit that.

We changed the oil in both motors, and given that we had to use a wire to root out the sludge from the pony drain so it would actually flow, I think this was probably overdue. We think we could see a hint of metal in the pony oil... Hard to tell for sure, so we'll fire it up and run it for a while and change it again to see what we see. It probably could use a couple changes to get all the old gunk out.

We added brake fluid, and after a good bleeding, we have brakes. The pedal is firm about half way down, and only only pumps up a little, so the shoe adjustment isn't bad, and the air is gone. The master was bone dry, so we'll let it sit and see how fast the fluid runs out a wheel cylinder or two...

We pulled apart one of the lift links and discovered that there were some sort of black plastic inserts in them, which are shot. This was a surprise, since nothing I've seen talks about these inserts in a Cat 12. I have all three manuals, and there's not a word of them... It appears I can buy the caps on ebay for about $40 a pair... We may do that, and hope that new caps with no shims or inserts will be somewhat better than the sloppy mess we have now. It's obvious that the lower ball has been welded and re-ground due to surface wear on the ball itself... Eeek.

The lift shafts only have one keyway, so we can't just turn them 1/3 rotation and re-connect. We'll have to pull the shaft out of the gear I think, so we'll deal with that if it seems to be needed after we get it operating.

I pulled the starter off and we will be replacing the pinon gear, as the ends of the teeth were angled the wrong way from wear. The gear on the belt drive looks fine, so that's good.

A large portion of the steering play is coming from the steering arm being loose on the shaft. It appears that the big retaining nut worked loose at some point, and it's been that way for a while now. We'll have to steer the grader to the left to tighten it anyway, so we'll probably do that after it's running. And we'll need a ~1-1/2" wrench, which none of us have presently anyway.

I need to make a hex wrench for the big drain plugs on the oil pan and final drive. They appear to be 1-1/4" female hex, so I'll just weld a bolt to a piece of flat stock. The oil pan drain was barely finger tight...

Penetrating oil soaking on the parking brake button, which is stuck down. Hopefully we can free it up and get the parking brake to work again. It isn't very strong when I yank on it, so we'll have to deal with that at some point I'm sure. (Hilly area where we grade, brakes MUST work...)

90wt in the final drive was pretty black. Probably need to put fresh in that and the chain boxes too. I think that's about 40 gallons of 90wt altogether. Might see if we can just buy a drum of the stuff, since we have a water truck that probably needs the trans and rear axle changed too...

No bad surprises, just loose bolts and stuck grease fittings, or hardened grease inside them. We'll get them all flowing over time.

Thanks to those on ACMOC who lend advise to those of us new to this kind of machinery!!

Here's a few pics of the best liner that we found... Not sure what these are from, but they're not mentioned in any of the service literature... ??

So the inserts are evidently P/N 2G7468. I do not know what they're supposed to fit, or if they ever were used on Cat 12 8T graders... ???