Furukawa Hydraulic Crawler Drill Acceptance Checklist: Drift, Alignment, and the Checks I Run Before Signing

This checklist is for the day a Furukawa hydraulic crawler drill lands on your site—new, used, or back from a rental. I work on the quality side of the equipment business, and I review every drill before it reaches a customer. I have written rejection notices over things that a simple walk-around would have missed. So if you are about to sign an acceptance form, run this list first. It is not a substitute for the OEM manual. It is the practical part that manuals don’t emphasize.

Use this checklist when you have to answer one question: do I accept this machine or not? If you are choosing a model to buy, this won’t tell you which one to pick.

When to Use This Checklist

Use it for a new machine delivery, a used machine purchase, a rental return, or a shift-to-shift fleet handover. If the machine has already been through the dealer’s pre-delivery inspection, run it anyway. Dealer checklists are useful, but they don’t cover your site risk.

The “new machine doesn’t need a checklist” idea comes from a time when a delivery was a simpler mechanical handover. Today, a crawler drill has electronic recorders, multiple interlocks, and a longer list of acceptance conditions. The checklist isn’t a formality.

The Furukawa Hydraulic Crawler Drill Acceptance Checklist

1. Undercarriage and Track Tension

Start with the track. A crawler drill spends its life moving over crushed rock, and the undercarriage is the easiest place to hide wear. Measure track sag with a straight edge over the top roller. The OEM manual gives a specific range. If the track is too tight, too loose, or worn unevenly, write it down. Also check sprocket teeth for hooking and the idler for leaking grease.

2. Hydraulic Oil, Pressure, and Filters

Check the hydraulic tank sight glass before the machine has run all day. Top it off and then check pressure at the port the manual tells you to use. Don’t trust the dashboard gauge alone; it may be averaged or smoothed. If the machine has data logging, pull the pressure history. Repeated relief-valve trips tell you the hydraulic system was pushed hard, even if the machine looks clean.

Take an oil sample on a used machine. The lab result tells you more than a visual check. A pump can run quiet and still be generating particles. Even after I accepted a used drill, I second-guessed whether I took the oil sample before the machine had run long enough. The two weeks of waiting for lab results were not relaxing.

3. Hoses and Routing

This is the one most people skip. They look for leaks. They don’t look at routing. Trace every hose clamp and bend. Hydraulic hoses fail at bends and contact points. Look for chafing on the boom, on the mast, and on other hoses. If you see a hose held away from another hose with a zip tie, check whether that tie is OEM or field improvisation.

Also check the identification tags. If the hoses are not tagged, the replacement procedure later becomes a guess. (I’m not a fan of guessing on 300-bar circuits.)

4. Mast Alignment and Drift

This is the part that gets called drift. If the mast or feed rail is out of line, the drill rod will not stay on target. The rig can produce full pressure and still drill holes that drift off the planned angle.

Quick check: set the mast vertical, put an inclinometer on the feed rail, and compare the angle with the cab readout. Then do the same at 45 degrees if you can. If the sensor and the physical angle don’t match, the alignment system needs to be recalibrated before you measure anything else.

If the rig uses a guidance aid like the Peregrine drill alignment system, check the calibration record for that too. Guidance tools make hole placement easier, but they don’t fix a bent feed rail. A digital screen can make a crooked setup look perfectly straight.

5. Rotation Head and Drifter Bolts

Take off the covers if you have to, and check the bolts that hold the drifter to the feed. Torque is not a feel thing. I use a torque wrench and a paint marker. Mark the bolts after torquing. If you come back in a week and the paint lines are off, you know something is loosening.

In Q1 2024, we rejected a drill because the mounting bolts had been re-torqued onto damaged threads. The dealer said it was probably fine. It wasn’t. The repair cost came out of their side.

6. Control System and Data Logs

Check the controller for active fault codes. Then pull the history, not just the current screen. I want to see how many times the machine has been in auto-stop, what the max hydraulic pressure was, and whether the engine was oversped. That data tells you a lot about how the previous operator treated the machine. On a new machine, there should be no unexplained faults. If there are, ask for a written explanation.

7. Safety Switches and E-Stops

Test every emergency stop on the machine. On a crawler drill, there are usually multiple e-stops: one in the cab, one on the platform, sometimes one at the rear. Test the tramming lockout too. If the tracks can move while the drill feed is in work position, that is a safety issue. Don’t accept a machine with a bypassed interlock. (The “we taped it for testing” excuse is not acceptable.)

8. Documentation and Serial Number

Make sure the serial plate, the control module, and the paperwork match. Take a photo of the serial plate and file it with the acceptance form. If the machine is under warranty, the serial number is what makes claims possible.

And while we’re on paperwork: when you search for the manual or parts, search by the model and serial number. One time we got a request from a customer that literally included “yuta furukawa sebastian” as the machine reference. That is a person’s name, not a part number. Another request asked “how many legs does a have” without finishing the sentence. A crawler drill has tracks, not legs; the stabilizers are cylinders, and the count depends on the model. But a parts request with an incomplete sentence is still a dead end. We found the part eventually, but only after switching to the serial number. This sounds like a small thing, but it wastes time and opens the door to ordering the wrong components.

After the Walkaround: The Test Hole

If you can, drill a test hole before accepting. Use the level readout to set the angle, drill the first steel, and measure the actual deviation. This is the real drift test. In my experience, this catches more alignment problems than any amount of visual inspection. It also gives you a chance to see the dust collector work and check the rod handling. Keep the test hole short if ground conditions are bad, but do it.

A few months ago, every spreadsheet said accept the machine because pressures and temperatures were fine. Something felt off because there was a recent repair that wasn’t in the log. We drilled the test hole anyway, and the drift was about three times the manual’s tolerance. I almost signed off without that test.

Common Mistakes

• Accepting before the oil sample comes back. Hydraulic pressure can be normal while the oil is full of wear metals.
• Trusting “recently serviced” without pulling records. The date on the sticker is not the same as the date on the oil sample.
• Checking drift only when the mast is new. Drift gets worse as pins and bushings wear. Measure it at acceptance and at every scheduled service.
• Asking for parts without a model and serial number. If you don’t know the model, the person on the other side can’t know the part. It’s not a fun phone call for anyone.

The goal is not to reject machines. It’s to make sure the machine you accept is the one you can run for the next thousand hours. That is the whole point of the checklist.