Why was CAT's 5000 Series discontinued?

[rshackleford]

any of these aforementioned companies will only purchase new machines (some Union deal)

off topic but, in my eyes, another example of the kind of crap that has let unions ruin this country.

 

[mntman552]

Mainly because 5000 series can't hold a candle to Hitatchi. We have 3 5130's two 2500 Hitachi's and I think they now have two or three I believe 1950 Hitachi's not sure of the last ones they started gettin them after I started treatment and got my bone marrow translplant and won't beable to go back towork for a while. We used to rent an 1200 and 1100 Hitachi from time to time and you could dig just about as much with the 1200's as the 5130's because the hydraulics were so slow on the Cats. Seemed like the Cat's always had a hydraulic pump or something goin to hell on them.

 

[alco]

As a general statement, the Cat machines were basically under designed for what they were expected to do. Their competition was so far ahead of them, that they simply couldn't compete unless the customer was the type who would only buy Cat equipment because of the name.

Hitachi makes a great machine, Komatsu makes a great machine, as did O&K/Terex and now hopefully Bucyrus will continue the trend. I've also heard the Liebherr machines are good.

 

[245dlc]

I've run the Liebherr machines in the construction size up to 50-55 tonne class and they are pretty nice machines. I wonder if Bucyrus will paint they're hydraulic shovels in the old brown and yellow paint scheme like when they use to produce shovels and hoes in the seventies and early eighties.

 

[alco]

Unfortunately they didn't choose the old yellow, maroon and green paint scheme. They had someone come up with a new scheme to represent the new company, and I still don't like it. I thought it would grow on me, but no luck so far.

 

[245dlc]

Yeah I gotta agree purple does not look good on an excavator. They must of hired a fashion designer to come up with that.

 

[Buckethead]

Many of these aforementioned companies will only purchase new machines (some Union deal) which precludes them from getting a used 5110 or 5130.

I am in a union and I never heard of that. Contractors buy and sell and rent used equipment all the time.

 

[qball]

man, i wish the union here pushed a new tractor policy.
hell, i would settle for an old machine so long as it ran.

 

[Buckethead]

Yeah I gotta agree purple does not look good on an excavator. They must of hired a fashion designer to come up with that.

Looks like the old Bucyrus-Erie, maroon to me.

 

[Cat Dr.]

Liebherrs aren't too bad of a thing, we run two 994B's here and a Hitachi EX3600 (-5 I think) and while the liebherrs have there share of painful problems a lot comes down to maintenance, and when they're going they go hard, admittedly the slightly larger Hitachi will out dig them and is definately more reliable, I seen a lot worse diggers than the liebherrs about...

 

[alco]

Looks like the old Bucyrus-Erie, maroon to me.

It's not a very good picture to show the colour, but it's more purple than anything from the stuff I have seen.

 

[Mass-X]

I’ve worked around 5000’s, and just like many of you, I have my own opinions on each model in the series. I’m not asking how they compare to competitors machines. What I would like to know is the reasoning behind the decision to discontinue the series.

If someone were to get a straight answer from the individuals at CAT who made the decision to discontinue the 5000's, what was it?

Did R&D costs exceed the foreseen manufacturing costs on improving the machines? Did CAT feel there was a lack of long-term market depth? Did getting the machines improperly pass-matched on some customers sites, and the poor job CAT/dealers did at getting knowledgeable maintenance staff to work on the machines play very much of a role? Was CAT's lack of maintenance training to customers part of the reasoning? Did CAT's issues with parts availability have a bearing? Did CAT want to pull their cards on improving/expanding a line-up of shovels with the intent of developing a relationship with a partner to go into designing/manufacturing the machines?

I’ve heard plenty lot of opinions, but would like to hear from some of the guys who work for CAT/dealers or someone with firsthand knowledge of why CAT made the decision. It took CAT six years to make a full turnaround on this class of machines, how many years of that has P&H been in the picture?

 

[Zed]

I think the general opinion is that the 5000 series were crap, everyone knew it, from production, maintenance and Cat. They had so many problems Cat would've had to start from scratch.
I'm definitely not anti Cat, I reckon they make the best dozers, graders and mechanical dump trucks in the business, but when it came to these things... well.
When it comes to big hydraulic diggers (200t +), if you want build quality you can't go past Liebherr, O&K (i know.. Terex, and now Bucyrus), and Komatsu, which is a Demag anyway. But they're more expensive to both purchase and to maintain. Hitachi's are cheap and reliable, but they fall apart pretty quick in hard digging.
We have a few Hitachi's at this site (Indonesian Borneo) 7 x 2500's, 7 x 3600's and 3 x 5500's. The booms on the 3600's crack up so bad that we have a spare rotable boom so that we can swap booms out for repair. Old one comes off, repaired boom goes on and then that one is repaired. As soon as it's repaired we change the next one that is the worst. We just had to remove the sticks from 2 of the 5500's so we could repair cracks in the end of the boom 2 feet long. And then the 2500's just like to crack all over.
They'll definitely keep boilermakers/welders in jobs.
We average 90% availability for the hitachi's and a little higher for the 2 x Liebherr 996's, around 91 -92 %. We also have 2 old RH120E's, the shovel is actually serial # 120001, the first production 120E.

 

[alco]

We also have 2 old RH120E's, the shovel is actually serial # 120001, the first production 120E.

Did you guys buy the shovel new? We still run an old RH200, s/n 40036, 16 years old with 104,000 hours on her.

 

[hvy 1ton]

I think the general opinion is that the 5000 series were crap, everyone knew it, from production, maintenance and Cat. They had so many problems Cat would've had to start from scratch.
I'm definitely not anti Cat, I reckon they make the best dozers, graders and mechanical dump trucks in the business, but when it came to these things... well.
When it comes to big hydraulic diggers (200t +), if you want build quality you can't go past Liebherr, O&K (i know.. Terex, and now Bucyrus), and Komatsu, which is a Demag anyway. But they're more expensive to both purchase and to maintain. Hitachi's are cheap and reliable, but they fall apart pretty quick in hard digging.
We have a few Hitachi's at this site (Indonesian Borneo) 7 x 2500's, 7 x 3600's and 3 x 5500's. The booms on the 3600's crack up so bad that we have a spare rotable boom so that we can swap booms out for repair. Old one comes off, repaired boom goes on and then that one is repaired. As soon as it's repaired we change the next one that is the worst. We just had to remove the sticks from 2 of the 5500's so we could repair cracks in the end of the boom 2 feet long. And then the 2500's just like to crack all over.
They'll definitely keep boilermakers/welders in jobs.
We average 90% availability for the hitachi's and a little higher for the 2 x Liebherr 996's, around 91 -92 %. We also have 2 old RH120E's, the shovel is actually serial # 120001, the first production 120E.

Does this mean you work at Grasberg/Ertsberg? I would think all those boom cracks would put the Liebherr's a little more than 2% ahead in availability. Do the Hitachi's never go down except welding?

 

[EGS]

I am in a union and I never heard of that. Contractors buy and sell and rent used equipment all the time.

I have never heard that either.

You would have a hard time convincing me that a labor union would care about what kind of equipment the contractor buys.

 

[Zed]

I work for a mining contractor at KPC (Kaltim Prima Coal) mine which is in Indonesian Borneo, Grasberg (called Freeport in these parts) is on the island Indonesia shares with Papua New Guinea. That mine is huge. This place is pretty big too, KPC put out 45 million tonnes of coal per year. We mine the wetern section of the pit and put out 12 Mt of coal and move 105 million BCM of OB per year.

We usually scope our shutdowns on the 3600's to include boom repairs so it doesn't affect MA but out MTTR (mean time to repair) is higher on the Hitachi's for some reason.
MTTR on the Liebherr's usually runs at 2-3 hours but the Hitachi's are around 6.
Alco, the Oka's came here very secondhand and have been parked up most of the time, we just put them back into service after a 8 month sleep as we had to send 2 2500's to another site south of here. The local mechanics are calling them the zombies, i asked why and they said because they don't want to wake up from their sleep!

 

[alco]

Thanks for the info Zed, I was wondering about that.

 

[big ben]

Ya its probably best for everyone the cat stopped the 5000 series. I just finished a cat excavator course and was talking to the instructor about this subject. Nothing is ever 100% but the instructor (who talks to cat reps weekly) said the deal between O&K and cat was 99% done when it fell through. A major battle was branding the machines (Cat wanted them yellow and O&K didn't like that) and it fell through. O&K then merged with Bucyrus. Cat IS and WILL be entering back into the large shovel world again and field follow units are expected around the end of 2012 or early 2013. Cat is more focused on mining than ever. Lets hope this round of machines turns out a little better....

 

[rare ss]

when we had our 345 delivered to us last year i was talking with the head of sales for cat down here and we got on to the topic of the 5000 series shovels,he was telling me that there going to drop the line of shovel dew to the high cost and fabrication of the shovels and just the enginerring going into these hovels were a nghtmare,they had some seriuos problems with these big shovels he also told me,so he pointed out that cat would propably stay away from this altogther its better to build what you know and can handle,

any CAT digger bigger than a 45ton is a DOG

we ran a new 365CL and it as always been not quite right, Hitachi and Komatsu's have their number on the bigger diggers thats for sure, shame they didnt get ahold of O&K CAT seem to be running at of Leihbers at most of their MARC mine sites over here