Neglecting the care and maintenance of your construction equipment can be expensive. Upkeeping your equipment’s undercarriage can make up over half of its lifetime repair costs. Maintaining your machine’s pins and bushings is essential to your undercarriage’s life and health.
What Are Pins & Bushings?
Pins and bushings can be found on virtually every type of heavy machine in the construction industry. Pins slot into bushings, providing for circular motion. These hinges allow the links to move together and flex over wheels, making the vehicle able to crawl over terrain. Consider the pins and bushings as the mechanical glue that holds your machine together. If this “glue” is neglected, then your equipment will start to fail.
3-Year / 4,000-Hour Warranty Coverage For Undercarriage Parts
How Pins & Bushings Affect Your Undercarriage
Keeping your pins and bushings is essential to your undercarriage’s health. They are crucial to keeping your undercarriage’s track chains at an appropriate length and tautness. If you properly maintain the pins and bushings, your track chains shouldn’t need servicing until their links and rollers have worn out.
What Takes Place When Pins & Bushings Wear?
Pins and bushings wear at the point where their inner diameters meet, often when there is a lack of lubrication. Internal wear is caused by normal usage over time, while external wear is usually caused by weather and intense working conditions. Worn pins and bushings can cause the undercarriage’s chains to stretch, loosen, or pitch. These types of wear cause considerable damage to your undercarriage, which may force you to pay for a more costly repair. Fortunately, practicing routine maintenance can prevent this kind of wear on your equipment.
Routine Equipment Cleaning & Maintenance
To avoid a costly replacement of multiple undercarriage parts (or worse, a replacement of the entire undercarriage) it’s crucial to perform routine cleaning and maintenance on your equipment.
Inspecting the Undercarriage of Your Machine
Before inspecting pins and bushings for more fine damage, examine the outside of the bushing and see if you can twist it by hand. If so, then the bushing needs to be replaced immediately. Neglecting this service can cause your undercarriage’s chain to break. While these are some basic tips on inspecting the undercarriage of your machine, you should always refer to the owner’s manual for machine-specific instructions.
Inspect Pins & Bushings Regularly
Inspect your pins and bushings for signs of wear on a regular basis in order to prevent excessive wear to your machinery. Catching issues early on may lead to reduced repair costs. After all, it is significantly cheaper to replace a worn-out pin and bushing than it is to repair wear damage done to the entire track or undercarriage of the machine.
When inspecting pins and bushings, look out for too much play in between the pin and bushing. The two parts should fit snugly together without wiggling or rattling. Too much space can indicate that your bushing has been worn down.
Additionally, inspect pins and bushings for excess dust or dirt build-up, and make sure to lubricate them frequently. Excess dirt and not enough lubrication can quickly lead to worn-out bushings. You may be able to purchase a dust seal to help keep lubrication in and dirt out.
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How Can the Life of Worn Pins & Bushings Be Extended?
Don’t throw your pins and bushings out at the first signs of wear! You can use turning methods to extend the life of your pins and bushings. Since wear primarily occurs on one side of a pin and bushing, you can maintain your equipment by “turning” it. This involves flipping the pin and rotating the bushing 180 degrees. This counter-rotation allows new surfaces to take the brunt of the undercarriage’s load.
You can choose to perform a wet turn, also called a greased turn. The greased turn calls for refilling the pins’ oil reservoirs with new oil. You can perform a greased turn by reassembling the end of the pins and bushings with heavy grease only if your equipment does not use oil reservoirs. If you try to perform a wet turn on equipment that uses oil reservoirs, it is bound to leak and cause future servicing issues. It is also a good idea to replace your plugs, sprockets, and segments at the time of turning to ensure proper chain tautness.
Turning vs. Full Replacements
It is more cost-effective to turn pins and bushings and increase surface usage rather than replacing them outright at the first sign of wear. Nonetheless, you should perform a complete replacement of your pins and bushings if your undercarriage’s chain still pitches after turning the pins. For an economical replacement of the pins and bushings, try purchasing aftermarket parts from DMC Wear Parts.
Understand Wear Limits for Your Equipment
Even though you can use wet or greased turns to stretch the life of your pins and bushings, it’s still important to understand the wear limits of your machine’s undercarriage equipment. Your equipment’s owner’s manual may specify wear limits for that particular model. You can also utilize wear tables to determine if it is time to turn or replace your pins and bushings. It is time to entirely replace your machine’s pins and bushings if you have already turned them and your undercarriage’s chain is continuing to pitch.
Aftermarket Undercarriage Parts
Purchasing aftermarket undercarriage parts may be a cost-effective option for your repairs and maintenance. Remember that consistent maintenance and minor repairs will prevent the need for larger and more costly replacements.
Get in contact with our aftermarket parts experts to find the perfect replacement part for your machine – at a great value. DMC Wear Parts offers an extensive inventory of aftermarket parts that are compatible with top manufacturers equipment and brands such as CASE, Caterpillar, Bobcat, John Deere, Komatsu, and more.
*All uses of manufacturers’ names, symbols, brands, and descriptions are used for reference purposes only and are not implied that any part offered is the product of these manufacturers.
