Achieving savings with Undercarriage Wear

Undercarriage, as a wear material on equipment is expensive due to the extra heat treatment and processing required to improve its wear properties. There are 2 ways to save money

1. Avoid accelerated wear
2. Utilise the wear material to its full available life

Accelerated wear – is where the components become prematurely worn, caused by any number of factors. It should be detected through regular Undercarriage Inspections. The cause of accelerated wear should be identified, investigated and rectified. This will ensure that components can continue to wear to 100% worn. Anything less than 100% is value lost. Undercarriage that is not regularly inspected typically will not achieve more than 75 to 80% wear.

Utilising the Wear Material to its full available life – this is where components are worn to on average 115 to 120% of their available wear and thus full potential of the components has been used. The result of this achievement will be a lower cost per hour/ton of operation and increased profitability. Achieving this consistently is not easy and there are some tools that can help: –

• End of life Inspection – the final inspection in the life of the components is recorded as the components are replaced. This allows the final % wear to be recorded for the component to determine its wear rate performance over its full life.
• Benchmark Component Performance – on a particular jobsite environment, a dataset of component average wear rate performance is established to enable comparison of current installed components. The benchmark establishes a standard against which all current performance is compared.
• Forecasted wear at next Replacement Opportunity Dates – this provides a tool for Reliability Engineers to view the future wear position of each undercarriage set currently installed. The most effective date can be determined for removal of the worn undercarriage to allow the undercarriage to wear to the maximum available life before failure.

This is the standard against which all undercarriage is managed in the TrackTreads Undercarriage Management System.