New FAE drum

[QwikDraw]

New FAE drum - with pictures

New style FAE drum and teeth. The worn teeth are at 75 hours, not too happy with durability. At $59 a piece and 44 of them I certainly don't want to do that every other week. Really they needed to be changed at 40 hours.

 

[APSmulching]

What's the soil condition of the area your in?

 

[QwikDraw]

What's the soil condition of the area your in?

Not a rock on sight. Sand plain. On cape cod.

I was getting a little to aggressive with the first set and putting them in the dirt. The second set seems to be doing a little better. The cost needs to come down to be inline with other manufacturers though. I could handle $30 a tooth. $59 is too much for 80-100 hours.

 

[APSmulching]

I agree, $30 a tooth is all they are worth or it would be best to run carbide and loose some production. If they don't lower the price then someone will come out with an aftermarket for much less.

 

[Marek]

Whats teeth were you running on it before ? How much better is your production ?

 

[QwikDraw]

These are the first teeth I've used. I'm on my second set now. The machine only has 100 hours.

 

[yellowdogsvc]

that's an impressive rate of wear-down. I'm running cobras in rock/dirt and seeing okay life even with some dings/chunks missing. I tried the cobra carbides and got from an hour to 8 hours before every tooth was destroyed and FAE didn't stand behind them. It was clearly a manufacturing process. Complete, clean shearing off of the carbide face. Like someone snapped a piece off with no effort.

I think the cobra replacements are 35- $55/tooth and $135 for the initial setup with holder. My double carbides last a long time.. I've gone a 1000 hours in the past before changing the doubles and leaving the HD ones on the ends.

 

[yellowdogsvc]

Re: New FAE drum - with pictures

New style FAE drum and teeth. The worn teeth are at 75 hours, not too happy with durability. At $59 a piece and 44 of them I certainly don't want to do that every other week. Really they needed to be changed at 40 hours.

Just noticed "new drum" mentioned in your post.
What type of drum is that? Haven't seen it before.

 

[QwikDraw]

Just noticed "new drum" mentioned in your post. What type of drum is that? Haven't seen it before.

As far as I know this is what all the new FAE heads will have. I was told I had one of the first ones on a crawler. They had some excavators running them with teeth lasting 150 hours.

 

[yellowdogsvc]

Did you have an FAE head before? From the pic, it's hard to tell if the drum design is different or tooth setup is different but the tooth holders are very different. The old style works well and the bolts are protected. Takes a little work to clean out debris on the cobra bolt heads but they come off easy.

Another thing I noticed; if tooth wear is that great, what will it do to material sizing? With a gap like that between counter combs and teeth as they wear, I imagine there will be stringy material. The old style head also had countercombs on the inside of the mulching door. Provides some strength to the door but also gives a tighter mulching chamber. I can reduce a lot of material to fine particles with the door shut. I don't think I could do it if my teeth wore down that much. It would be like a shear bar on a chipper being way out of alignment.. bigger pieces discharged and stringy material.