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Heard a dock master in Savannah mention something about swing radius and it clicked | Dredge Operators - Vivisector

Heard a dock master in Savannah mention something about swing radius and it clicked

I was waiting on a barge to clear, chatting with this old timer who runs the dock down at the Savannah River ship channel. He mentioned that most newer operators don't realize their swing radius eats up half the bay when they're maneuvering. I went back and timed my cycles, and sure enough I was losing like 45 seconds per dig just from over-correcting. Anybody else find a specific move that shaved off real time once you fixed it?

3 comments

3 Comments

josephbailey3mo ago

Man that old timer knew his stuff. I had a similar wake-up call running a 40-ton crane loading scrap steel. My swing radius was way too wide on every rotation and I was burning fuel and time like crazy. Once I tightened it up to just barely clear the truck bed, my cycle time dropped from about 90 seconds to under 60. It felt weird at first but once the muscle memory kicked in it was like a completely different machine.

young.michael3mo ago

Ninety seconds to under sixty is a hell of a jump just from tightening up swing radius, I gotta say that sounds way too good to be true unless you were also changing something else at the same time. I think you're probably counting your cycle time different now than you were before, or maybe you were already doing some other fix without realizing it. Dropping a third of your time just from one adjustment on a 40-ton crane doesn't add up unless you were swinging it like a full 180 degrees when you didn't need to. Most people I know who claimed that big of a gain were actually mixing in a faster hoist speed or a better truck spotter at the same time. Not saying it didn't help, just that the math on pure swing radius alone doesn't usually get you that kind of savings.

kai_burns733mo ago

So you're saying he didn't actually tighten his swing radius at all and just got faster somewhere else? I gotta disagree a little bit here. I've seen guys clean up 20-30 seconds on a 40-ton just by cutting the swing arc in half, especially if they were leaving 20-30 feet of air between the load and the truck before. It's not about the math on paper, it's about how much wasted movement you had before. If you're swinging 90 degrees when 45 would do, that's half the travel distance right there, and on a machine that slow, that adds up fast. I'm not saying he wasn't also running a faster hoist or whatever, but I've watched enough operators to know a tight arc can shave a ton of time without any other changes.