French quarry lowers owning and operating costs with superior wear life of Caterpillar ® K-series bucket tips
Carrire de Trapp, a French quarry located in the North Eastern region of Vosges at Raon l’etape, near the city of Colmar, added a new Cat® 992G large wheel loader to its machine fleet at the beginning of 2006. The bucket of the wheel loader came equipped with Caterpillar’s advanced K-series bucket tips. Now, after almost 3,000 hours of operation, Leopold Meire, the maintenance and equipment manager at the site, sees K-series as “a very good product” which directly helps reduce his owning and operating costs.
Meire closely monitors his owning and operating cost and his budget is made in euro/ton. As to the bucket tips, he monitors the penetration ability and the fuel consumption that is associated to it. Blunt tips are replaced in order to keep the fuel consumption low.
The 992G wheel loader and the K-series tips are used to extract a very hard rock called “la bleue”, used for example in the expansion of the TGV railway network. Compared to the competitive tips previously used at Carrire de Trapp Meire is satisfied with the improvements in tip wear life. The average wear life has increased 30 percent from 160 hours to 210 hours after the adoption of the K-series tips. “In terms of return on investment Caterpillar is largely superior. Fifty hours more on the life of the tips is enormous,” Meire says.
This improvement in wear life has positively impacted fuel consumption at Carrire de Trapp since “the tips stay sharper longer. The bluntness of the tips raises our fuel consumption immediately from 95 l/hour to 120 l/ hour and this is almost an immediate indicator that we have to replace the tips. With K-series we are able to keep that same fuel consumption for longer, up to 210 hours.”
Depending on the market demand, Carrire de Trapp can extract up to three million tons of material per year. The quarry primarily uses the 992G wheel loader together with three Caterpillar 777 off highway trucks for loading the blasted material and hauling it to the crusher.
K-Series Bucket Tips
January 22, 2007
French quarry lowers owning and operating costs with superior wear life of Caterpillar ® K-series bucket tips
Carrire de Trapp, a French quarry located in the North Eastern region of Vosges at Raon l’etape, near the city of Colmar, added a new Cat® 992G large wheel loader to its machine fleet at the beginning of 2006. The bucket of the wheel loader came equipped with Caterpillar’s advanced K-series bucket tips. Now, after almost 3,000 hours of operation, Leopold Meire, the maintenance and equipment manager at the site, sees K-series as “a very good product” which directly helps reduce his owning and operating costs.
Meire closely monitors his owning and operating cost and his budget is made in euro/ton. As to the bucket tips, he monitors the penetration ability and the fuel consumption that is associated to it. Blunt tips are replaced in order to keep the fuel consumption low.
The 992G wheel loader and the K-series tips are used to extract a very hard rock called “la bleue”, used for example in the expansion of the TGV railway network. Compared to the competitive tips previously used at Carrire de Trapp Meire is satisfied with the improvements in tip wear life. The average wear life has increased 30 percent from 160 hours to 210 hours after the adoption of the K-series tips. “In terms of return on investment Caterpillar is largely superior. Fifty hours more on the life of the tips is enormous,” Meire says.
This improvement in wear life has positively impacted fuel consumption at Carrire de Trapp since “the tips stay sharper longer. The bluntness of the tips raises our fuel consumption immediately from 95 l/hour to 120 l/ hour and this is almost an immediate indicator that we have to replace the tips. With K-series we are able to keep that same fuel consumption for longer, up to 210 hours.”
Depending on the market demand, Carrire de Trapp can extract up to three million tons of material per year. The quarry primarily uses the 992G wheel loader together with three Caterpillar 777 off highway trucks for loading the blasted material and hauling it to the crusher.
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