Busy week last week. A lot going on at work. So I didn’t have a chance to post these pictures of the first working test of the excavator until now.

Last week, we finally got the hydraulic hoses and the coupling between the engine and the hydraulic pump purchased and installed. We even painted the excavator a cool shade of greenish blue. So we were ready for a first test. And it worked well!

Checking the motion of the arm.

Lifting up the front of the vehicle using the arm to “crawl” forward.

The first test hole that we dug.

It wasn’t all perfect though. The pressure gauge seems to have been mounted wrong and doesn’t indicate pressure. And there were a few small hydraulic fluid leaks. But hopefully both of these will be easy to fix.

The bigger issue is that the left-right and up-down motion of the boom is way too fast. Dangerously so if someone is standing nearby. I’ve read up on the net, and it appears there are simple hydraulic flow limiters you can buy to address this. They sound like they are simple couplings between the hose and the valve that have a smaller hole restricting the flow of fluid through, without actually affecting the pressure. (Sounds like the hydraulic equivalent of an electrical resistor.) The posts I read suggest they are adjustable for the desired flow rate. Next step is to see if we can source these things here in Thailand.

Unfortunately, the rainy season has just begun, so the entire land is now a giant mud pool. I may have to wait until the rains taper off and the land dries a bit to do much more testing.

But I would call this first test was an incredible success. I’ve done quite a few projects in the past, and this is one of the bigger and more complicated ones. They usually don’t work this well on a very first test. I would give lots of kudos to the metal worker on the construction team that spent the last month building this and Thoss (an engineer from work) who helped an enormous amount by finding the things we needed to source and helping to instruct the worker along the way. And an additional thanks to the designers at CADplans for this CADdigger 628 design. It is the first time we built anything like this, and I have no complaints at all about the CADdigger designs we bought. Good job!

And hopefully the above minor issues will be easy enough to address so we can put this excavator into full construction use soon. I intend to use it for digging the trenches to lay the water and electrical pipes, and for digging the holes for planting the bigger trees we intend to buy.

That’s one big project completed. Shall we see what’s next?