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Used to think you could eyeball the cutterhead angle on the old 'Mudpuppy' dredge, but a 2-degree miscalculation in the Columbia River silt cost me a full day of production.

My foreman on the Portland job last spring brought a digital inclinometer and made me check it before every shift. I thought it was overkill until I saw the pump efficiency numbers. Now I set it religiously. What's your method for keeping the angle locked in on older gear?

3 comments

3 Comments

uma_ellis13d ago

Yeah, the old eyeball method... my pride still stings from the time I swore the angle was perfect while we were basically just stirring up mud soup for six hours straight. The pump sounded like it was crying. These days, it's a battered old magnetic angle finder and three checks before coffee, because I clearly can't be trusted.

matthew16613d ago

We had a 4 inch trash pump on a site last year that sounded like a dying animal for two days because someone eyeballed the slope. @uma_ellis, I feel your pain. My rule now is the angle finder goes on the pump base, the pipe, and the ground it's sitting on. If all three don't match, no one gets to touch the starter. That mud soup sound haunts me.

joel_martinez13d ago

My old foreman called that sound "the pump's death rattle." He'd make the rookie buy coffee for the crew every time we heard it. It was a very effective, and caffeinated, teaching method.