A camp is upgrading to a Thiokol 3700 and that means they will be selling their 2100B. I don't have pics yet. I will need to drive about 100 miles and snowmobile into where it is located to get the pics. It has a diesel engine, OC-12 Rear end with drop axels (rebuilt with only maybe 10 hours on it), and spare drop box gears with a different gear ratio, if I remember there are spare axels and a spare main OC-12 housing, automatic transmission that was rebuilt a few years ago and only has a few hours on it. The snowcat has been used on and off over the last 20 years to clear snow once a year off of an access road to a camp. I have driven it several times and it runs fine. It has a six-way blade on the front (up/down, tilt left/right, and whatever you call changing the cutting edge angle. It does not angle cut like a road grader. I have no idea yet as to the asking price. It is located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of central California. Any ideas as to a fair price to suggest to them?
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Thiokol 2100B up for sale soon
- Thread starter Wayne
- Start date
I agree. I remember taking these off a few years ago standing them on edge in a serpentine shape and replacing some of the belts and bolts. I just don't remember how many. Both the belts and bolts are not cheap and the work is tedious. Getting the rusted nuts off of the bolts is the worst. I needed a 3/4 socket with a long breaker bar and cheater bar and a 1" air gun. Still needed to actually break some of the 1/2" grade 8 bolts to get them off. Cutting or heating with a torch ruins the belts. Maybe if I had a scarfing tip on the torch it would have helped. I used a small cutoff wheel on my DeWalt grinder to cut the bolt heads this last year on a 3700. I don't know of any easy way to do it.
Struggled through that a year ago when rebuilding my WT Imp belts. Rolled up I guessed about 225 pounds each, had to transport them around on a refrigerator dolly (challenging with no helping hands). What a royal PITA, I probably spent 40 hours of my free labor. Had to make a "special tool" just to gain access to the bolt heads in the grousers, even then some would either not budge or broke off. Grinding wheel experiment was a time consuming failure. Eventually bought a plasma torch and hosed them off. Those nuts and bots had been on there since 1975.
Falline provided the belts, Fastenal provided the grade 8 nuts and bolts. About $2300 later all is good for another 50 years....for someone else to worry about.
I used an offset 3/4" box wrench for the nuts and then I ground down an impact socket too with a slight taper to fit in those grousers. The impact socket was great when I needed a 4' cheater on a 3/4" drive breaker bar to break the grade 8 bolts. Both worked, but if you use an impact wrench, the box wrench seems to jump off easily and then strip out. The thin cutting wheel on the battery grinder was not too bad, but it is all very time consuming. If I turned the bolts with the nuts facing the snow, I could use a nut splitter. I may think about this for awhile. The 3700 tracks I did had either 72 or 73 grousers per side, I forget. I think the long ones had 8 bolts and the shorter grousers had six bolts (asymetrical tracks). It was close to 1,000 nuts and bolts.
I think I tried most everything you mentioned. Tried a nut splitter, it was a piece of crap. Cutting wheel worked but I would still be at it today. Plasma torch was the quicker route but I had to be careful not to damage the backing plates. Imps have only 56 grousers, so I only needed to deal with like 560 nuts and bolts..probably 70% of which I ended up cutting off. Fun and games but it is what it was, or was what it is...an all consuming hobby. Only 'special' people work on their own cats.
Thefatsquatch
Active member
Did you end up getting it? I bought mine several years ago, and I needed to swap out the belts. I just went with a 3 ply, 3/8" rock pit belt, and drilled it with paper-drills and a template. Its 1200 bolts, but not 12000 dollars.
I have a small plasma torch now, but didn't have access to one back then.I might try it. I actually tried to drill out the head of the bolt with cobalt drill bits. Gave up on that too. I might try a small scarfing tip on a torch too. The regular tip I tried using was too big. It heated up the entire nut and bolt and made it too easy to burn the belt or cut into the grouser or backing plate. A smaller tip might focus the heat in a smaller area and let me try to cut flat across the grouser or backing plate to focus on the nut or the head of the bolt. On some of them I just heated up the nut and it came off, because it expanded. No matter how wee try to get these things off, they are just a pain. The cutoff wheel I used was this last year. I needed to remove 5 nuts that would not come off to do a belt patching job. I agree, I would die of old age before replacing all of the bolts. Lol
I have actually called a few belt manufacturers looking into purchasing belting from them and drilling my own too. Just wasn't in a hurry, so it is on hold. I have extra belts from other Thiokols in the shop. I need to measure the spacing of the holes and make them available to people. They won't really do me any good unless I want to try to redrill the holes at the proper spacing. I might look into this as another option. to save a few bucks. I don't think a few extra holes would weaken the belts that much. I am not pulling heavy loads with the 3700 A/B machines.
I didn't have a scarfing tip for my plasma cutter, so had to be really careful cutting off the bolt heads that were against the backing plates so as not to screw up the holes. Refined the technique as I went along. Cut the heads almost flush with the plates then drove them out with a punch.
I think I will try this next time, because the plasma option doesn't heat up the entire bolt. I have a small plasma cutter, so I might test it on some bolts at my house, before hauling it up the hill about 100 miles away. I never looked into different tips for it, I assumed there was only one. I think I might look into that as well. Thanks for the info.