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PSA: Hit 1,000 hours on my dredge pump and it's trashed | Dredge Operators - Free To Speak

PSA: Hit 1,000 hours on my dredge pump and it's trashed

I finally rolled over 1,000 hours on my old 6-inch pump last week out near the Trinity River. Checked the wear ring and impeller and both are shot way worse than I expected. Nobody told me the real maintenance schedule changes that fast after a thousand hours. Anyone else find their pump falls apart right at that mark?

3 comments

3 Comments

murphy.tessa3mo ago

1500 hours on a 6-inch Yuba job and my wear ring looked like a donut with a bite taken out. The impeller vanes were worn down to nubs on the suction side. Fine sand is the killer, it gets between the ring and the impeller and just grinds everything down. I started checking my clearance every 200 hours and found that once it opens up past an eighth of an inch, the wear accelerates fast. You might want to measure that gap now before you run it again, if it's too wide you're just wasting fuel and losing production anyway. Also check your suction hose for any cracks, those let in air that causes cavitation and that'll eat an impeller even faster than sand.

willowg883mo ago

Right, because who doesn't love paying for a pump to just sand down its own insides like it's on a weekend spa retreat. Sounds like the real lesson here is that you need a maintenance log thicker than a phone book for these things. An eighth inch gap might as well be a canyon when you're burning diesel to push mud.

ross.lily3mo ago

Man that lines up with my experience but it might not be the hours alone. Run time is just one piece of the puzzle. What really tears up a dredge pump is what you're pulling through it. Trinity River has a lot of fine sand and silt that acts like sandpaper on the wear ring. I had a pump on the Sacramento that looked fine at 900 hours because the material was mostly gravel and clay. Then I swapped it to a sandy job and it was junk in 200 more hours. Check your intake screens too. A worn screen lets bigger rocks through that hammer the impeller way faster than normal wear would.