Unfortunately, there are no pictures today, just grumbles.
If the torrential rain wasn’t bad enough, we managed to get all three of our main items of equipment to fail!
The little digger, after another small setback with the tamper early on, it did a few hundred metres before failing in a whole new and exciting way, not catastrophically so but it has damaged a few hydraulic fittings on both the head and the excavator.
The big digger decided today was the day that the little magic box that controls the engine speed would give up the ghost. Thankfully some very classy bush mechanical work with sticks and old rope meant we could jam in on high enough revs to unload a truck and get it back to Maldon so we can pull it apart… again. It’ll no doubt be a 30 second fix, once we’ve done the 5 hours of removing covers and fittings to access the box!
The telehander, showed no interest in doing anything that resembled moving today, which was an issue for unloading a truckload of concrete sleepers, hence the need to get the big digger at least a bit usable in a hurry. This is obviously an electrical issue, it’s very much a wet weather fault and by its nature very hard to successfully diagnose and fix while the rain is pelting down.
The frustration thing with all these faults, and pretty much everything we’ve had lately is related to things wearing out and failing due to age. We’ve not yet had a single failure that could have been reasonably forseen as a maintenance issue, which is nice, however it is a real reflection on just how much work all our gear actually has done. It’s also becoming apparent, now that all the gear is well over 10 years old (telehander and big digger are 20 years old), that not having undercover storage is a fair factor here too, we’re noticing a lot of the components, particularly under the covers where water just cant dry out when they have to live outside, are showing fair signs of being weather beaten.
If anyone reads this and takes pity on our small crew of hard working track blokes, we could really do with an undercover storage shed/ workshop facilitily of our own, so we can do heavy repairs undercover and care for our equipment. Please get in touch, we’d be open to sponsorship, naming, glory or fame to get it across the line (fame might be a stretch…..) however if we don’t ask, we won’t find out. Please contact Will at civil@vgr.com.au if you think there’s a way of solving all our troubles.
On the up side, the district received around 25mm of rain today, so that’ll keep everything look green and fresh for a while longer.
In terms of workdays, it’s now safe to say there won’t be anything this week, Thursday and Friday will be fully dedicated to fixing things. As always if you’d really like to join you’d still be welcome, however it’ll be very much focused on getting the machinery back into a usable state. At Maldon from 8am on both days for anyone who is just itching to help out.
VGR Civil Blog 