Took me 2 years to realize my boom angle indicator was lying to me

Yeah so I've been running this Grove RT for about 2 years now. Always thought the boom angle was reading a little off but I just figured it was an old machine. Last Tuesday I'm picking a load of steel beams at a job site in Newark and the foreman yells up at me asking why I'm so shallow. I look at my indicator and it says 45 degrees. He pulls out his digital level and tells me I'm at 38. I felt like an idiot. Turns out the sensor bracket had gotten bent at some point probably from a rough pick. I was basically guessing my radii the whole time. Has anyone else found a weird thing on their rig that was just wrong for months?

2 comments

2 Comments

ryan71919d ago

That bit about the sensor bracket getting bent hits close to home. I had a similar thing on a Link-Belt where the whole bracket was tweaked just a hair from a boom-to-ground contact a year prior. Never caught it because the indicator would zero out fine on the ground, but once you started getting up there the angle was off by a good 5-7 degrees. Ended up having to re-do a whole pile of load charts for jobs I'd done that year, thinking I had the reach when I really didn't. It's the kind of small thing that makes you question every reading you ever took on that machine.

baker.ben19d ago

That 5-7 degree difference must have messed with a lot of your numbers.