Bulldozer Maintenance and Putting It To Work In the Forest

Monday May 1, 2023 Guerneville CA.

Maintenance

I planned to do some maintenance on the bulldozer today as it’s that time of year when some road maintenance is in order.

I took some diesel over to it and put it in the fuel tank.

Transmission oil

The transmission has a small leak so after it’s been sitting around for about a year, it needs to be topped up with trans oil.

I’d charged up the battery a couple weeks ago so I knew it would start. It started right up and I let it warm up a bit.

Bad hoses

While it was warming up, I noticed the two hoses on the back rippers were in pretty bad shape and would need to be replaced soon and sooner if they started to leak. You can see the two hoses on the left are pretty worn out and rusty.

Road maintenance

Once it was warmed up, I headed out to the hills to do some road maintenance but I didn’t get very far when I noted the transmission needed more oil as it was having trouble backing up a hill.

I stopped it here and drove the quad on home to get some more oil for it.

Loose track

I also noticed this track was a bit on the loose side so I got the grease gun that I use to adjust it.

Oil and grease for the dozer from home.

I added more transmission oil to the transmission and tightened up the track with the grease gun. The grease pumps up a cylinder that tightens up the track.

Back to work

Ok time to give it another try. It worked much better with more oil in the tranny and with the tightened up track.

Out-sloped roads

I went up this road fixing little things as I went. Mostly I out-sloped the road in the places where I could see drainage problems from the heavy winter rains we had. There wasn’t really any serious road damage as all the roads on our place are out-sloped so they drain well without washing ditches in them.