Took me 8 months to realize my swing angle was off

Ran a cutterhead in Mobile Bay for two seasons and kept burning through teeth way faster than the guys on the other shift. Finally one morning my deckhand pointed out the ladder was sitting way steeper than the manual specs, like 5 degrees too much. Checked my notes and yeah, I had been eyeballing it off the wrong reference point the whole time. Anyone else had a setup habit that took a crewmate to catch?

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1 Comment

ray_miller4114d agoMost Upvoted

Stop beating yourself up about eyeballing it, we all do that. Once you get those numbers burned into your head from the last job, you just assume the setup is the same everywhere. I spent a whole season running a dredge pump with the intake screen angled wrong because I set it off the deck rail instead of the keel line, cost me a fortune in clogs. A greenhorn finally asked why I was leaving a foot of clearance on one side and nothing on the other. Now I always tape a copy of the spec sheet to the control panel with a grease pencil, check it every morning before the coffee kicks in.