Info for Komatsu owners and operators

Posted by Wayne on May 06, 2004 at 18:38:17 from (205.188.116.78):

Hey guys I posted this on the crawlers board also, but thought it was important enough to put here too so this info will reach as many people as possible........................ I discovered something today that might be of interest to ya'll if you are running a piece of Komatsu equipment. I have a customer that bought a new service and operators manual for his PC150 excavator to aid him in doing the correct maintenance on it. Due to the age of the machine and the operating conditions he went to the lubrication guide chart for the hydraulic system and chose what the chart said was a 10W-40 weight Engine oil and got what Texaco showed as being Komatsu's recommendation. Here is where the problems begin.......First you never want to use a detergent oil in a hydraulic system but according to Texaco's tech line EVERY multigrade oil available in the US is gonna be a detergent oil......Second, and I actually called Komatsu America on this, they DO NOT recomment a detergent oil in the hydraulic system......What is supposed to be in the hydraulic system is either a 10W or a 30W Non detergent oil. According to the guy I talked to at Komatsu what CAT calls their powertrain oil is correct for the excavators hydraulics, along with any other brand that meets the same CAT specs, which I believe he said was a TO-4 spec........What Komatsu told me is that there is basically something being "lost in translation" when the equipment is brought in here because the oil is rated differently over than it is here in the US. From what I understood there are non detergent engine oils available over there that aren't available here, so when the translation to 'use an engine oil' is put in the book is is correct for there, but not for the US. If you work on the equipment for a living like I do, or have been around and involved in maintenance long enough youprobably know that you shouldn't use detergent oil in a hydraulic system. Now we have to start looking out for those buying a piece of equipment for the first time and actually making an effort to do things right by going by the book, because the book isn't always gonna be right. Believe it or not both guys I talked to at Komatsu knew the manual was calling for the wrong type oil, but both said they had never had anybody call and ask them about this problem before. This tells me that there are alot of people out there that are blissfully going by the book and slowly killing their machine's hydraulics. Hopefully at least some of them have asked somebody knowledgable before they wasted alot of money and filled their system with the wrong oil. My custmer is a long time equipment owner so didn't ask me before he changed his oil...the book has to be right, right??....now he's stuck with a 50 gallon system that he can only change 30 gallons of at a time so it's gonna cost him big to fill and flush enough times to get all of the detergent oil out of the system . I'm just glad I was made aware of and was able to catch the problem before the pumps went and it became my nightmare........If you know anybody using a piece of Komatsu equipment please pass this info along. If you have any questions you can call Komatsu America and they should be able to answer them for you.

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