Learned the hard way about cutterhead speed on a muddy job in Baton Rouge

I was running a 12 inch cutterhead suction dredge on a canal cleanup outside Baton Rouge back in June. For months I kept fighting with the pump clogging every 20 minutes and the production numbers were garbage. A older operator named Dale came by to drop off some spare parts and watched me for maybe 5 minutes. He asked why I was running the cutterhead at full RPM in that heavy clay mud. I told him that's just how I always did it. He laughed and said I was basically churning butter instead of cutting. He had me drop the speed by almost half and suddenly the material flowed smooth as glass. No more clogs and we moved twice the yardage that shift. Has anyone else found that slower cutterhead speed actually works better in sticky material?

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kelly_west742mo ago

Slow cutterhead on mud is just basic physics though, isn't it? Been doing this long enough to figure out that spinning fast just aerates the clay into a mess.

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ryan_gibson842mo ago

What kind of clay are we talking though, sandy or heavy?

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nancy4752mo ago

Yeah I used to be all about cranking the RPMs thinking faster=better no matter what. Actually had a job a few years back where I was spinning the cutterhead like crazy on some heavy blue clay and it turned into this awful soupy mess. Took forever to clean up and I was so frustrated. Then a buddy of mine who's been at this way longer than me told me to slow it down and let the clay just roll off naturally. Night and day difference. So yeah kelly_west74 is totally right here, slow is the way to go with heavy stuff.

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