Restoration Blog

Not all Stick Twiddling

by: Bob H.

So many folk still think that operating a wet dredger (or a dry one for that matter) just involves pulling levers and dropping mud somewhere.  Let me assure that is NOT the case!!

To show what really happens (apart from the assumed lever twiddling) here’s what happened today aboard Patricia.  We’ve noticed for a while that the hydraulic oil is far from the honey like the colour of new ISO 46 bio degradable oil.

So today we collected some recycled fluid from WD, a new fresh (expensive) 20 litres and commenced swapping old for new.  Draining the old fluid was SLOW (we found later the drain valve had collapsed) and confirmed the current contents were shall we say, past their sell by date!

  Honey golden.... NOT! 

We’re not sure where the colour is from, but we suspect that the steel pipework may have sat for some time empty or with some water in the oil and we’re seeing rust particles in quantity. We removed inspection plates, cleaned out the tank, replaced everything then started up to run the system again.

Result?

Bags of rubbish of oily sludge, 80 litres of oil for Jason to filter and recycle and a day of dredging lost - but some cleaner oil in the tank!

Monday next week will see us testing to try and determine why the main boom ram is so sluggish. 

“May all locks be in your favour.”