Brains of a piss ant maybe for you, but in my own business I have to be able to solve engineering issues on the fly to get a customer back from the dead and operating without have to keep repairing the issue... outside the cheap repair customers who just want the quick dirty fix..

@@facediaper4607 Says face diaper....

@@dougdelane3642 pull the dick out hard to understand ya

If you're dumber than a box of rocks, it wouldn't matter a lick if you had the hands of a surgeon. Your statement makes zero sense. Knowing how to correct a shoddy design takes intelligence. I don't know about you, but I'd pick a surgeon with a shaky hand with the brain of Einstein over a rock solid hand controlled by the brain of a moron.

@@dougdelane3642 Hello? Face diaper= face mask? I mean, it doesn't take a lot of common sense to work that out. The op might be onto something as far as having the brain of a piss ant.

Lol the engine didn't think hard enough and the welder fab guys said fuck it I not getting paid to think so fu k it.

They probably didn't weld the backside of the square tube to avoid bowing it. There's a shaft in there with bearings on both ends. Factory welds are symmetrically on both sides of the square tube so the stresses cancel out. That's the only logical explanation I could come up with. Or it's just incompetence.

@@kasparroosalu blowing through is an issue but a good welder wouldn't... a MIG jockey paid 15 an hour ya they will not give a shit... I have gotten into a cat mini excovator and have found many weld defects that are the reason for failure.

@@facediaper4607 I'm talking about bowing as in being bent like a bow.

The “horizontal beam” isn’t a beam, it’s a number of flat plates welded together. So it boils down to why not use bigger pieces and more plate? Initially the reason is of course 🤑 money. Now with time though, with the number of units out there getting used and abused in severe service for several years on end, they look at the failure rates/common failure points, and figure out using more plate on every single unit compared to the number of customers effected by this failure, they crunch the numbers and it’s just not worth it to us all as a whole. 99.99 % of customers manage to not constantly overdo it with the down pressure while grinding stumps and don’t have problems in this area. When used properly, this area is under very little stress, however if you obliviously and constantly take too big of a bite or increase the down pressure during the pass, the machine will hop itself up off the stump and bounce around leading to insane stress in this area as you can imagine. This is definitely the most common operator error with running stumpers and it occurs rarely and only lasts for a few seconds at a time with professionals using personally owned units. Those units handle the intermittent stress of this occurrence for years on end with nearly zero failures at the neck. However, this type abuse during operation is rampant and constantly/continuously occurring with rental units! When the operator is clueless and they don’t own it so they don’t care if it’s hopping around violently destroying itself or even just not considering how maybe that’s not the correct way to use it. Rental units hop and bounce around during their entire day long rental sometimes because of the combination of the for mentioned reasons combined with the rental companies using worn out cutters and charging people by the hour/day. You obviously don’t want an inexperienced guy borrowing an unfamiliar tool from you to be in a big hurry but that’s the situation they set up for themselves. So while they do obviously suffer occasional neck failures, the people they fail on, almost exclusively the rental companies, they easily make twice their money back on the machine by the time failure does occur so….. it’s not like their new at this and they continue to order new Vermeer units for their rental fleets as fast as they can get them because they are profitable long before they fail. Even with inexperienced unsupervised, unlimited abuse type of service, their still worth every penny they initially cost for them and earn profits. It sure is impressive when a heavy tracked machine jumps itself around and busts big pieces of stump off instead of grinding little bits like it should but anyone running something like this should honestly know better. It’s acts just like wheel hop in a serious 4x4 during a steep hill climb, if you keep it up loading/unloading violently, hopping the thing around, big bite, no bite, big load, no load, jumping itself around, eventually it’s gonna break something. It’s definitely not worth designing and building EVERYTHING to survive multiple years of the most extreme instances of constant abuse and operator ignorance. If we did that a F150 would cost everyone as much as a Baja trophy truck and this stump grinder would cost as much as a current F150. That would actually be the moment the idiots among us have officially won, when the majority of us can’t afford regular normal things anymore because everything needs to be designed and built completely idiot proof to the max. It’s bad enough a simple lawnmower already cost us all $5-$20 more to buy just because it needs comically ignorant safety stickers warning us not to stick our hand in the place the grass gets cut up🤔. Duh. Charge us all extra for a sticker reminding us to not eat our piano while you’re at it. The dumb far outnumber the rest of us at this point and even United together the rest of us simply cannot afford to pay enough extra on every item to compensate for and counteract the amount of ignorance running amuck. It’s progressed to the point where making something idiot proof nowadays has many levels and barriers we couldn’t of even imagined ten years ago. Idiots are bound to break stuff, it’s not worth idiot proofing the entire planet at our cost in effort to prevent those few abusive idiots from the occasional yet well earned disappointment of machine failures. Pretty much if these things break on you, you either deserved the down time for your ignorance, or by then the machine has earned the down time twice over with earned profits anyway. 👊

Companies should take note of the videos that IC puts out! What an amazing engineering/design knowledge he has acquired

@@nortons4673 you would think that by a snobby college prick engineers don't take advice from anyone outside their field. Yet I keep fixing or getting shotty designed work...

@@facediaper4607 that’s the way it goes unfortunately

@@nortons4673 true, would love to see that they have to take like 6 month internship in welding/Fabrication in the field following another engineers blue prints.. think that would improve the quality and designs better...

@@facediaper4607 the best ones do, but it feels as if they are the vast minority.

Q 52

Glad you enjoyed it!

Very nice comment Tony and you can probably guess I did a 5 year apprenticeship. I took a job at JCB in Staffordshire in 1984 with my apprenticeship eleven years behind me and an H.N.C. in Mechanical Engineering. One month into the job I had several design engineers and draughtsmen employees with degrees …… coming to me saying that they are going to make a complaint about my being a Senior Design Engineer on a salary of £9500 p.a. with ‘only’ an HNC ……. I wasn’t paid overtime. Ironically they earnt quite a bit more due to being paid overtime. One year later I moved job within JCB to escape the back biting and finally gave my notice in 1989. I went freelance contracting and earnt a lot more money with a lot less responsibility and I was paid overtime. 😆👍

Those were the days...

Note that this is a 12 year old model, discontinued and superceded by the SC362/382 line. Perhaps some arborists/tree folks that use Vermeer/work with them can step in and add to the story? Also, I see some of these 372 as rentals, which is likely how these get wrecked/abused. Design could also be result of keeping costs down...and customers pay for the next revision...

Seems like engineers know their forces and math to design things but it's not their job to think ahead about how it's to be used, repaired or even assembled. Sometimes the smallest change makes a 6 hour job a 30 minute job...

@@xoxo2008oxox Designs are always to keep costs down. I suppose there are several stump grinders out there to chooses from. How does the durability of this machine compare to others in the same price range? I think repair Isaac made was good, I don't understand why he pulse welded versus continuous.

I have to agree that it's a top notch repair. All of Isaac's repairs are well thought out and executed. I have to wonder why that vertical tube didn't crack. It may have been engineered that way to prevent the tube from cracking. There is a shaft inside that transmits power to the cutting disk which also acts as a flywheel. I could see if the tube cracked, bent but didn't come all the way off that you could bend the shaft or tear up one or both of the expensive 90deg gear boxes. Another commenter mentioned that he ran this type of stump grinder. He said that it could have come from operator abuse, cutting stumps that were too tall.

Isaac is an excellent fabricator and what he accomplishes is amazing. As a design engineer, I will say that sometimes the logic behind a design isn't always obvious. More than once I have made a change to very old equipment only to learn the hard way why the original design was so. Other times it's all about saving dollars. Hard to say in this case, but Isaac did a great job as usual; makes it look easy!

Yeah, most likely from repeated abuse and or past its expected life. Im assuming it's mainly from sideloading. I wonder if he could adjust the max pressure on that motion to reduce the stress while in use.

Have u met the internet? LOL

Glad you like them!

You hit the nail on the head as far as "in the right hands". I know my first couple of times using one I dug into the parent metal and pretty much destroyed the workpiece. It wasn't a big deal simply because I had a mentor that wouldn't let me near a customer job. So I practiced on machines that were parted out and headed for the scrap yard. It's so easy to dig too deep with them. Isaac makes it look easy. His torch work is also top notch. And his welding. He's an incredible talent for sure.

For sure

That's what most guys don't have, they can fix it but they don't know why it broke and how to prevent it from happening again. This guy is super talented, I would pay him to let me be his slave/helper/spare whatever....