KW Land Works
Member
We demo'd a PC88MR-10 Komatsu with a Fecon head last week and it worked great for what we were doing. We still want to try one or two other 8 ton carriers but definitely sticking with planar teeth either way. We run Cimaf teeth on our Cat with great results and the 65 hp 'matsu needed all the help it could get from sharp teeth.
The Fecon had their Samurai teeth and it performed as expected. I'm not used to running planar teeth without some means of depth control so that was interesting. I stalled it out dead several times and I wonder if DCR would have prevented it. When the demo unit came to me, the teeth were pretty well shot. After about 5 hours of cutting, I sharpened them up and it made a noticeable difference but several were still too far gone to be brought back to new condition. Fortunately, we were mostly cutting brush.
The Samurai teeth initially struck me as being overly aggressively with regard to the knife angle but I hit a car tire w/ steel rim (one of the stall outs) and it didn't damage them as much as I expected.
I expect the Fecon DCR and Cimaf head will run about the same as far as teeth go but I'm looking forward to testing out both.
The head put a significant drag on the carrier and you could really tell when running the tracks. Fortunately, there was no real drop in slew power and that's what I used the most. The setup we were running wasn't wired for continuous flow so we had to rig up some zipties on the trigger to keep it spinning. If that weren't the case, it would have been easy to turn off the head while making moves with the tracks. My second complaint is the touchiness of the stick controls. I'm not sure if some servo controller gains needed to be adjusted or if it is a characteristic inherent to a relatively heavy attachment but it would get into what felt like a positive feedback oscillation that would worsen until you let off the stick controller. It mostly happened when cutting to the side vs straight ahead while trying to make slow stick movements.
I took some GoPro video and will post the link as soon as I get it uploaded.
The Fecon had their Samurai teeth and it performed as expected. I'm not used to running planar teeth without some means of depth control so that was interesting. I stalled it out dead several times and I wonder if DCR would have prevented it. When the demo unit came to me, the teeth were pretty well shot. After about 5 hours of cutting, I sharpened them up and it made a noticeable difference but several were still too far gone to be brought back to new condition. Fortunately, we were mostly cutting brush.
The Samurai teeth initially struck me as being overly aggressively with regard to the knife angle but I hit a car tire w/ steel rim (one of the stall outs) and it didn't damage them as much as I expected.
I expect the Fecon DCR and Cimaf head will run about the same as far as teeth go but I'm looking forward to testing out both.
The head put a significant drag on the carrier and you could really tell when running the tracks. Fortunately, there was no real drop in slew power and that's what I used the most. The setup we were running wasn't wired for continuous flow so we had to rig up some zipties on the trigger to keep it spinning. If that weren't the case, it would have been easy to turn off the head while making moves with the tracks. My second complaint is the touchiness of the stick controls. I'm not sure if some servo controller gains needed to be adjusted or if it is a characteristic inherent to a relatively heavy attachment but it would get into what felt like a positive feedback oscillation that would worsen until you let off the stick controller. It mostly happened when cutting to the side vs straight ahead while trying to make slow stick movements.
I took some GoPro video and will post the link as soon as I get it uploaded.