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Best hydraulic fluid stop-leak product?

Cannonmn

Stainless
Joined
Jun 25, 2016
Have a Cat 10k lb. capacity forklift that leaked some fluid, just. A minor annoyance, until I found it was down about a gallon and added a gallon of Walmart Tractor hydraulic fluid that meets the Cat TO-2 spec. Immediately the lift cylinder started leaking at an unacceptable rate out of the top. I’m guessing the previous owner had some stop-leak in there and I diluted it; don’t know any other reason the leak would get much worse immediately as it did. I see ads for Blue Devil and other stop-leak products that make the seals puff up. Recommendations? Some info on Blue Devil here:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Blue-Dev...4000&wl11=online&wl12=171896459&wl13=&veh=sem
 
Fix the ram. I would never dump anything like that in anything I own. All that will do is screw up the pump and valve bank.
 
Fix the ram. I would never dump anything like that in anything I own. All that will do is screw up the pump and valve bank.

Ummm... fix the part that's leaking?

Depends.

If you are content with just being able to say "I own a CAT forklift..." park it out of the way and let it rust. Go use another FL.

If you want to USE it?

Repair it.
 
I've spent many a hour under, on top of and inside of many different breed of forklift and I can honestly say I have never heard of a 'stop leak' product for a hydraulic system. Best I can offer is a pound of hamburger and some sawdust dumped into the hydraulic tank. That concoction should stop something.

Stuart
 
I've spent many a hour under, on top of and inside of many different breed of forklift and I can honestly say I have never heard of a 'stop leak' product for a hydraulic system. Best I can offer is a pound of hamburger and some sawdust dumped into the hydraulic tank. That concoction should stop something.

Stuart

Ground cork, oatmeal, Barrs leaks and water. Pre-Barrs leaks days, horse manure for the fiber content. "For real". Can't very well say "no shit", eh?

But that was only the same morning one took the beater to a used car lot to trade for another beater.

:)

Can't see it going undetected on a FL trade-in, no.

Seal was probably failing already. Top-up of juice just gave it enough oomph to finish it off. Pressure more than incompatible chemistry, so I wouldn't blame the fresh juice.

Not so long as it was what it was LABELED as, anyway.
 
"Blue Devil" is stuff I used to see for sale at the "dealers only" used car auctions....

"Will fix any problems, guaranteed"

Usually bought there for the drive home.....
 
"Blue Devil" is stuff I used to see for sale at the "dealers only" used car auctions....

"Will fix any problems, guaranteed"

Usually bought there for the drive home.....

Only "liquid" I ever saw put into the motorcar that actually worked as to sorting "any problems" from an auctioned auto had to do with the uncommitted balance in a bank account that could be siphoned off for the exercise.

I suspect leaky forklift hydraulics share the same sort of DNA, and will respond best to infusions of cash-money.
 
Well shucks, I thought at least One guy would say he dumped in some of that stuff and it stopped the leak, made it run quieter, and used less fuel. Then he rubbed some on his p... and....

So I’ll either find a seal kit for the Cat TC-100d or take the cylinder off and give it to a friend whose business is repairing hydraulic cylinders.
 
Well shucks, I thought at least One guy would say he dumped in some of that stuff and it stopped the leak, made it run quieter, and used less fuel. Then he rubbed some on his p... and....
Bad timing is all. All the best liars must be working on a political project over in their sandbox this week.

If yah figure frothing the hydraulic fluid to a frenzy might keep it in place longer, just ask if it can be scraped back to a leak-resistant fit with a Biax.

:D
 
Depending on the mast cylinder it may just be a plugged drain line, most masts have single acting cylinders, with a small drain back to tank for any seal leakage, if you raise the mast and it drops less than a couple of inches a hour with a light load - moderate load good chance you just have a blocked drain and fixing that will resolve the leak issue the way the manufacture intended it too. Your getting more than a few inches of self drop - seal leak by a hour IMHO its new seals time and you have to hope your lucky and the cylinder is not damaged. I find generally new seals to have about a 50% sucess rate at best, good seals don't normally wear out, but get chewed up by cylinder wall damage, rust etc, that in turn then kills the new seals fast.
 
Well - I can't see some snake oil causing a safety issue ... that seems a bit dramatic, but I have never heard of a "stop leak" product for hydraulics, not saying that it doesn't exist... but ...

On the other hand - I am driving a living (?) testament to Barrs Leak!

I have a 2004 'Burban with <400K miles on it. It had recently been replaced as Mamma's primary vee hickle already, and it started drinking coolant. The truck has electrical issues as well, and a scar down one side, so we will not be puting any real $ into fixing it from here out. I was thinking about pulling the heads off and hoping that it was a blown gasket, but I was told that the heads on this motor were known to crack. And then I remember a chum had one with a cracked block.

Well, I aint dumpin' that kinda $ into fixing this thing, so I don't know that I want to tear it down - only to not put it back together.... So I decided that I would try some "stop-leak" and just see what happens...

So I went to the parts store and got the most expensive bottle of juice on the shelf. It was a pretty large can of copper coloured Barrs Leaks (IIRC) and was still only $10 or maybe $20 on the outside...

I dumped the bottle in the overflow tank (I don't think that this truck has a port on the rad).
That was maybe 3 years ago? It is my daily driver, but not for any distance normally. To this day, I cannot recall having added ANY coolant to it since I dumped in the snake oil. Not even a little top it up the day after! I gotta say - I'm amazed!


But I wouldn't expect a hydro system that runs at high pressures to accept the same stop-gap repair that a 13# system will accept.


------------------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox
 
On the other hand - I am driving a living (?) testament to Barrs Leak!
Barrs actually has a sound technical basis, lots of testing, and was never "snake oil", though it had to overcome condemnation-by-association if only because of what it was set next to on the shelf at the parts stores.

One caveat is that it works best if the cooling system has at least 25% WATER in it. Three generations in my family have "given up" a few degrees of freeze protection to run 100% glycol to sidestep corrosion issues.

Barr's still worked when my BMW sixes began their inevitable dance of cracking heads to flinders, but it didn't work as fast or as well as if I had used the 50/50 pre-mix or at least allowed "some" water in the cooling system as most of my mates have always done.

100% Glycol, BTW freezes at a higher temp than 50/50, however.. "frozen" Glycol is sort of a greasy wax. It can't crack a block like expanding water-ice does anyway.

2CW
 
I asked the members of our local machinist’s club to recommend a heavy equipment repairman. I called the one who was highly recommended, who charges $95./hr plus $100./day for his truck. He does “house calls” which was my preference. He’s booked for a month but I got on his list. One encouraging thing he said was that in cases like mine, the cylinder may be repairable in-place on the vehicle. We can get by for a month using the smaller vehicles. Main thing I like about the big cat is the looong forks, often we can move two skids at once.
 

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I haven't read all the responses.


However I do work for CAT in construction equipment validating hydraulic performance for excavators.

Unit you got looks to be before Mitsubishi almost completely bought Cat out. Mitsubishi lift trucks = Cat to and I dislike the Mitsubishi units. Before this I was a auto mechanic.

Bottom line...do not put any "stop leak" in anything that you own or care about. It causes more issues down the road. What part of VA? Let me make some calls but I won't be in until Wednesday.
 
They do make oil stop-leak. I know a guy that put some in a old D8 dozer, and I have to admit, it did slow the leaking down a lot, but didn't stop it. I would never run it in anything of mine though.

I think what the oil stop-leak does is that it has some chemicals in it that cause rubber to swell. I think you may have some success in a gearbox that just has some seals that have gotten old and hard. I don't think it would ever work in a high pressure application (as in a hyd system) or where the seals actually have physical damage.
 
It's already been said at least twice here, but I will repeat it. A hydraulic system is not like a cooling system or a lubrication circulation system. In particular, a useful hydraulic system has some precision valves with very small internal clearances, and a "stop-leak" is just about guaranteed to ensure you will have to spend more money replacing the valves than you would have fixing the original leak problem.
 








 
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