Skip to main content

Identifying the Blown Hydraulic Hose and Design Flaw

6:39
15:00
51.4K views

At 6:39 in

Building a "newish" Diesel work truck

What happens here

The scene shifts to a Caterpillar skid steer with a critical issue: a blown hydraulic hose. The presenter and a colleague locate the hydraulic fluid leaking from deep within the machine's boom assembly. They discuss in detail the design flaw of the Caterpillar skid steer, specifically how mud, snow, and ice accumulate in the track assembly, compacting around the hydraulic hoses. This trapped debris causes the hoses to chafe and eventually rupture, leading to repeated failures. The lack of an easy escape route for this debris is highlighted as a major design oversight.

Goal: Pinpoint the cause of the skid steer malfunction and understand the design issues.

Tools and materials

  • Caterpillar Skid Steer — The machine being diagnosed
  • Headlamp — Providing illumination for detailed inspection in hard-to-reach areas
  • Hydraulic Fluid — Identifying the source of the leak and demonstrating the problem
  • Mud/Snow/Ice/Debris — Illustrating the cause of the hose damage due to chafing

What they say

Hide

know you gotta click the button well in typical Minnesota fashion it's starting to snow because it's been about that long we may be plowing tonight but the cat blew a hose not The Pusher the cat I wish it was The Pusher if it was a pusher it'd be easier so it's right here this oh thank God I thought it was that always I called Alex up and he's like oh my God I'm so sick of cat hoses so the hose is inside of the Boom it goes all the way it's got to be fished all the way through this way up and then I don't know this one runs on that I think it runs right here you can see it this is the hose right here right this one no the the one you see the one that's split in half oh damn it and we just gave her a new oil change and everything hey let me ask you I've never had a mess so many lines any skid loader in my life I've had that one single cap blow more lines than five other machines do you think it's what the guy before us did or do you think it's the design of the cat itself a little bit of both okay that upper hose I think is less related to the guy it's all those lower hoses for the track assemblies yeah it had all that mud compacted in there okay so the hoses were like touching each other and chafing on each other and then I took all the mud out then they were chafing even more you know so that would to me would say that that's a bad design if they've got the hoses where they're buried in mud because where to cat skid look where do skid loaders go mud if that can be an issue where then they just sit and rub in mud to me that's like a design flaw cool I'll show you how it gets all the mud in there it's actually I've been looking at it every time I took the track off both sides singing that's a terrible design because I you know I but then again I don't know how you would get around it I'm not an engineer you know so yeah but we've never had any other machine ever give us this many problems with hoses I sure haven't yeah so you can see this here see that big ass opening right there yep that's where all the dirt gets caught up in here spins off this Cog drive and it all just spits in there you know goes right into the motor because I scraped on every bit of mud on this thing and if you pop the cab right now when we pop the cab there's gonna be more in there you know under the cab into the cab compartment this right here you know it's kind of hard to say if if let's just say this bolt was loose here you know and it had and it was kind of shimmying but it…

Auto-generated from the video audio.