Found a trick to stop my cutterhead from clogging in heavy clay

I've been running a dredge on the Mississippi for about 12 years now. Last summer we hit a patch of that sticky blue clay near Baton Rouge that would gum up the cutterhead every 20 minutes. I tried slowing down the swing speed and it helped a little but not enough. Then an old timer told me to run a water jet at the cutterhead intake at 80 psi while we worked. I rigged up a 2 inch hose from our discharge pump and it cut the clogging down to maybe once every 3 hours. Has anyone else messed with water injection on their cutterhead for tough material?

2 comments

2 Comments

anderson.spencer6d ago

Back in '09 I was dredging a pond in Arkansas that had that same nasty blue clay. I rigged up a 2 inch line off our booster pump and ran it straight to the cutter ring with a couple of 1 inch nozzles pointing at the intake. Worked like a charm. The clay would still build up a little but it washed off way faster. One thing I learned is you gotta keep the pressure up around 90 psi or it doesn't do much. What size pump are you running on your rig?

grayt465d ago

Yeah that blue clay is something else, I swear it's like trying to dredge wet concrete sometimes. We had a job down in Georgia a few years back where we were clearing out a old mill pond and ran into that same stuff, it would just cake up on everything and we had to stop every hour to knock it off with a shovel. I remember my uncle rigged up something similar with a fire hose nozzle but he couldn't keep the pressure steady enough and it kept dropping below 80 psi so it was basically useless. That 90 psi tip is gold though, I've seen a lot of guys try to cheap out on the pump and it just doesn't work right when the pressure drops.