Somebody's mad, and they have a right to be: just six months, maybe 400 hours, and their new final drive motor is acting up again. Did they buy junk?
Here at Texas Final Drive, we regularly open up final drive motors and the story of the failure is almost always written inside the motor. It’s not usually a manufacturing defect or a bad reman job. It’s often debris from the first failure that’s still living in the machine and ready to chew through a perfectly good replacement.
There’s a good chance that the drive isn’t the root cause. The system may have failed and got a fresh drive to devour.
What a Failed Final Drive Motor Leaves Behind
When a final drive motor fails, it never fails politely. We regularly see bearing races spall, pistons scuff, and the rotary group grind itself down. And all that metal goes somewhere. Fine particles may ride the case drain line straight back into the tank. Bigger particles hang out in the hoses, the cooler, the valve block, and the low spots in the hydraulic reservoir.
Here are a few other Shop Talk Blog posts you might find interesting:
