Wright County Engineer Adam Clemons told the board of supervisors this week that the only two excavators his department uses need major repairs.
“One excavator that is the smaller one, 315, that is six years old, needs a new set of tracks on it. That’s gonna be about 20 grand in maintenance. They just went bad on us quick. The other excavator, 324, is the 11 year old, gonna get a whole new engine. So we’re going over our options right now for a whole new engine. There’s a crate engine that we can throw in that the guys can do, and our shop is going to do all this work. So we’re going back and forth on can we just throw a crate engine in, a reman crate engine, where it essentially comes out of another one, or break it down and just do a block for block in there where we would have to reuse our upper end and just do the lower end where they would take our block and replane it and redo all the seals and whatnot.”
Clemons says you can blame the weather as one reason why the smaller unit has had problems.
“You have your plates that are attached to kind of a chain that goes around the chain is the part that bushings are all gone in it. So with this being such a dry year, we didn’t have a lot of lubricant or mud inside those tracks that they kind of want.”
No decisions were made by the Wright County Board of Supervisors this week, but early estimates put the total cost at up to 60-thousand dollars for the repairs.
