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A 30 year guy on my first crew said never trust the load chart past 80 percent, and a near tip in Amarillo proved him right
I ran 78 percent on a 90 ton pick last month and the pads sank two inches on soft ground nobody flagged. What is your cutoff for walking away from a chart number?
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sam_murphy3917d ago
The chart number is about the machine, not the ground under it. That's the part your 30 year guy was really getting at even if he said it sideways. A 90 ton chart assumes you're set up on something that can hold the load, and soft pads sinking two inches means the ground was already telling you it wasn't. So 80 percent isn't some magic number, it's just a rule of thumb for when people stop doing the math on everything else. You can be at 60 percent and still dump it over if the outriggers are on mud or a septic tank lid. The chart is one input, the matting and the soil bearing and the level are the rest, and those don't have a percentage. Walking away is less about the number and more about whether you actually trust what's under the pads.
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