Remember when we used to run the old 8-inch suction dredges on the Sacramento?

We'd fight silt clogs for hours, constantly watching the vacuum gauge. Then our outfit switched to a 10-inch cutterhead model, and the difference was night and day. The cutter just chewed through the compacted material near Rio Vista, keeping a steady flow and nearly doubling our daily yardage. Anyone else make a switch like that and find it changed the whole job?

3 comments

3 Comments

grant1303mo ago

You doubled your yardage with just a two inch jump? That's wild. We went from a 6-inch to an 8-inch dredge and barely saw a 20 percent bump. What were you running before, some beat up old thing from the 70s? The gear must have been totally shot to get that kind of leap. Makes me wonder if the cutterhead design did more work than the pipe size.

ellis.nina3mo ago

Wait, so what kind of cutterhead did you guys have on the old six-inch setup?

amymiller1mo agoMost Upvoted

@grant130 I think that old cutterhead was actually the bottleneck, not the pipe size.