Major shovel Fail.

[Hank R]

My contact up at the mine is a truck Mechanic, that grew up across the street from my house, My understand was that shovel had issues in the lower end. Also me and 3 friends meet every morning at 6:00 for coffee, Al his son in law Warren used to work for P&H in Fernie BC now he is Staff at Highland Valley in charge of shovels and Al is going up to see them on Friday and he hopes to find out more for me , He is hoping he will not be the fall guy for this job. As he hired a contractor from the US to do this job.. Just not sure how much information I will receive or what I can place on line here.

 

[DMiller]

Last photo, post 18 Look FAR Left, UC. Appears was removed to REAR. WHY would they do that? Would have to be taken SIGNIFICANTLY Higher to get it out.

 

[Truck Shop]

It looks like the under carriage to the left in this photo. I don't know much about this type of work-but those
supports look rather small to me compared to the ones in 92U's photo.

 

[kshansen]

I have an old bumper jack out in the shed I could loan they if that would help get this back up on the jack stands!

Back as a kid we would use a pair of those bumper jacks to lift the rear of our lot cars while working on them. Kind of surprising we lived through that!

 

[Hank R]

Nothing has really happened over the last week, they suspect a jack failure. I think they are waiting for a 3rd party to do a investigation, as to what went wrong and why. The contractor that does this kind of work is well known and has lifted shovels for years. My pea brain thinks it will be a long time before shovel is jacked up and a check inside for damages etc. I would think a lot of mines are watching this failure real close.

 

[Hank R]

I was thinking that BC Mines act will or may be changing the rules as to how they do this lift and safety issues. I do not think I have it in me to work under that much weight after looking at the jacks.

 

[crane operator]

How else would they do the lift? Any way they do it, either jacks or cranes, its probably not a light little pick.

The difficulty is, there's probably not a lot of this kind of equipment around, and its easy for the powers that be to say "can't lift it like that"- but don't offer any alternatives. And then nobody can pick them up. What they going to do then? Write it off and push it in the quarry pit?

Personally, if the jacks are engineered and correct, I think I'd prefer jacks over trying to pick it with cranes. Maybe jacks with manual lock dogs.

 

[Truck Shop]

Call these guys. lol

 

[92U 3406]

The one in the picture I posted once the undercarriage is walked out, its lowered back to the bottom of jack travel. Since the shovel rests across the beam its really hard for it to go anywhere. Apparently the laydown pad is engineered to handle cranes, jacks etc.

What really sketched me out was jacking up the shovel to do rollers. There had to be half a dozen people under the carbody installing the shim plates around the piston rods of the jacks as it went up.

 

[DMiller]

Can imagine the late night sweats those that worked under the house are having now.

 

[Nige]

Once the upper works have been jacked up sufficiently and the lower works have been removed I'd bet money that the jacking system is lowered down on to some type of mechanical lock before anyone is allowed to go under the revolving frame to work.

 

[Hank R]

Sounds like they have a company to come in and try to get the shovel off the ground. Going to cost several Million bucks plus $300,ooo.xx of welding so they can lift it.

That is all I heard .

 

[DMiller]

Still cheaper than buying another shovel and allowing for the wait time.

 

[Truck Shop]

Amazon had one listed and could be delivered free with prime by Friday.

 

[Vetech63]

Let's get a few of us from HEF up there and show them how it's done. I'm thinking $1.5 M?

 

[DMiller]

Let's get a few of us from HEF up there and show them how it's done. I'm thinking $1.5 M?

Was thinking with inflation $2m

 

[92U 3406]

CAD or USD?

 

[Truck Shop]

Let's get a few of us from HEF up there and show them how it's done. I'm thinking $1.5 M?

You won't mind if D Miller, John C, Nige and I set back in our directors chairs
pointing to things that need attending, for a small cut of the pie of course.

 

[Tugger2]

Early in my welding career the logging co i was working for sent myself ,a couple of mechanics and the dealers field mechanic in to camp to change out the centre pin bushing and the actual boss that holds the bushing in on a 7220 American log loader . We had the right jacks ,a big beam to go across the front of the house and a pile of new 8"X8" timbers for cribbing all sent in to camp on the barge . All pre planned based on dealers instructions.
Long story short we got it jacked clear of the carbody ,ready to roll out the undercarraige. 3 cribs under the counterweight. A piece of timber split and one side crib collapsed and the machine crashed down just like the mine shovel above and sat on the counterweight.
No one was hurt .No investigation as it was obvious how it happened,just another oh F#*k moment . next task was to raise it back up which we did with help from a D9 that was parked by the shop.Grabbed some 3' dia butt ends and used them for blocking. Continued on and completed the repair reassembled the shovel which went back work with no other problems .
Those old Americans were built super heavy duty ,just the way shovels were back then.They could take i hit like that and keep working. Im wondering if that mine shovel has any of those extremely robust qualities built into it and will recover from this without excessive damage. Hopefully for the mining co she gets jacked back up swept off and passes a good inspection . Then they can carry on with the repairs they set out to do at first. Maybe im way off on this call ,but fingers crossed for them.

 

[92U 3406]

Early in my welding career the logging co i was working for sent myself ,a couple of mechanics and the dealers field mechanic in to camp to change out the centre pin bushing and the actual boss that holds the bushing in on a 7220 American log loader . We had the right jacks ,a big beam to go across the front of the house and a pile of new 8"X8" timbers for cribbing all sent in to camp on the barge . All pre planned based on dealers instructions.
Long story short we got it jacked clear of the carbody ,ready to roll out the undercarraige. 3 cribs under the counterweight. A piece of timber split and one side crib collapsed and the machine crashed down just like the mine shovel above and sat on the counterweight.
No one was hurt .No investigation as it was obvious how it happened,just another oh F#*k moment . next task was to raise it back up which we did with help from a D9 that was parked by the shop.Grabbed some 3' dia butt ends and used them for blocking. Continued on and completed the repair reassembled the shovel which went back work with no other problems .
Those old Americans were built super heavy duty ,just the way shovels were back then.They could take i hit like that and keep working. Im wondering if that mine shovel has any of those extremely robust qualities built into it and will recover from this without excessive damage. Hopefully for the mining co she gets jacked back up swept off and passes a good inspection . Then they can carry on with the repairs they set out to do at first. Maybe im way off on this call ,but fingers crossed for them.

They're pretty beefy units.

Funny to think about how on every major outage they'd send the inspectors inside the boom and they'd come back saying, no joke, that they found over 100 feet or so of cracking inside the boom. In the next breath they'd state that only 20 or 30 feet of cracking need to be repaired as the other 70 odd feet were not critical.

Most major components like the boom, dipper, gantry, track frames, carbody etc are usually replaced every so many hours. I can see the reasoning behind only fixing 20 feet of crack in a critical area if they're going to be replacing that component in a couple months anyways.