Increasing the Durability of Tools for Forest Road Maintenance

Abstract

To ensure the care of forests, it is necessary to make them sufficiently accessible by forest roads. The basic working tool are hammers, or round shanks of various shapes, composed of a body and a tip. They are subject to a strong abrasive environment, which often leads to damage up to the complete destruction of the functional part of the tool. For these reasons, it is necessary to deal with the possibilities for increasing their lifetime. One of the possibilities of increasing the service life of these tools is hardfacing by welding. The article deals with the abrasive resistance of the original material of the tool and the hardfacing materials. Based on the chemical analysis of the base material of the tool, we found that the tool is made of manganese steel 38Mn6. This material was used as a standard and was compared with the hardfacing materials Abradur 58, E DUR 600, UTP DUR 600 and OK 84.58. Electron microscopy was used to evaluate the microstructure. Next, the Rockwell hardness measurement was performed on the samples. The original tool material 38Mn6 reached the lowest hardness value, namely, 21 HRC. The highest value was reached by the hardfacing material E DUR 600, namely, 59 HRC. Subsequently, a test of resistance to abrasive wear was performed according to GOST 23.208-79. Based on this test, we can conclude that the highest value of resistance to abrasive wear was achieved by Abradur 58. Even though the hardness of this coating was slightly lower than the hardfacing material E DUR 600, specifically 56 HRC, we can state that this hardfacing material (Abradur 58) achieved the best results among the investigated materials.