By around 8 am we were all ready to go and hit the road.
We stopped at the Safeway in Flagstaff and took up half their parking Lot to pick up a food order that Denise had placed for the week.
Once on the job, we had a lot of stuff to unload, and I fueled and serviced the excavator.
My first task was to dig about 60’ of trench, so I layed that out and got to digging.
All went well for about 30 minutes, then it seemed like the excavator suddenly got much quieter.
Strange.
Then I noticed it was starting to get warm.
Shit.
Opened the engine bay to see the serpentine belt just laying there.
Double shit.
That explains why it got quiet-no noisy cooling fan running!😄😄😬😬
It sure picked a piss poor time to break down-I was straddling a sandy ditch and was just a few feet shy from completing the dig.
Damn.
Turns out an idler pulley seized a bearing.
Top is a good idler.
Bottom is what very little was left of the one that sized a bearing. 😬
This sucks because at this point we NEED the excavator to do ANYTHING. Nothing else on the job can happen without the excavator at this point.
Triple shit.
We wasted 2 or 3 hours calling several Bobcat dealers to see if they might have the idler-no joy.
Even with overnight shipping, the soonest we could expect a new idler was going to be sometime Wednesday.
We were scheduled for a special trench inspection at 7am the following morning that we called off.
I wasn’t willing to accept having the job shut down for three friggin days because of a 45 dollar idler pulley seized, se we removed the remaining one that luckily is still good and the same as the one that died, and headed to town to hit the auto parts stores to try and find a suitable replacement.
We were going to need a good and willing parts guy to go the extra mile and a little luck, but it was the next card to play, so off we went.
We lucked out at the NAPA.
It took awhile, but the parts guy there actually found an exact match.
Turns out that idler is used on a ton of vehicles including Jeeps and Subarus.
So new idlers and new belt in hand, we headed back to the job site to patch the excavator back together.
We drove back as the disappearing sun began to paint the sky in pastel colors.
We got the repairs done as the last light left the day,
We finished our trenching by headlights and wrapped up around 9pm.
That put us almost back on track-tomorrow we would drop in our conduits and see if we could still get our inspection done. 👍