The way we work Mk2

Yair . . . As most folks here will know I am a bit of a dinosaur from a bygone age and I tend to think a little different.

I am amused for example by discussions about cycle times for excavators. It seems to me that unacceptable amounts of complexity is being built into machines to pick up fractional improvements in so called "performance".

In the real world does a two second improvement to a swingers cycle time make any difference?

Most machines were developed to an acceptable level of performance a generation ago and it seems to me that it's been all down hill from there.

I spend a lot of time looking at job sites through 20x50 Nikons on a tripod and I can say for certain that lack of decent kick-arse management negates potential ten or fifteen second improvements in the time it takes to load a truck . . . I was held up on the highway a while back with a twenty ton excavator scratching down a batter and loading out a six truck string on a six hundred foot haul . . . six bloody trucks.

I see it all the time and wonder about this fixation on "performance".

It's not new. Back in the scraper days with (say) two fifty/three hundred loads a day coming off the push-cat I could never see the point in tandem pushing to pick up a few seconds here and there.

Just thought I'd throw this out there to create a bit of discussion. (he grins)

Cheers

Scrub, I tend to agree with you on the focus of "performance". Seems as though common sense still and always will prevail. This "performance" really commands a big checkbook to stay up with the "Jones" in the equipment line at today's machinery prices.

You also hear a lot contractors and owners say that they cant find operators that can run the older stuff for example like a friction cranes, draglines and clamshell where you have to use hands and feet not just joysticks allot of the young operators cant get the hand foot coordination down pat. and its easier to find truck drivers "on and off road" and a hoe operator than it is to find pan operators. Just changing timesand you have to change with it. 35 years ago who would have thought that you needed to hook a laptop up to your machine to find out whats going on with it now we use it all the time.

How about that wonderful little switch to change from power mode to econ mode.
May as well just leave that one off the build sheet.
I have yet to get into a hoe and find the switch in any other mode then the power mode.

So when the manufactures are using these great numbers for fuel consumption its just a joke because the switch will never be in econo, at least not in my part of the world.

Hatchequip, your right about the operators but we are in the same boat with mechanics that can fix these things.
We send guys out to work on grapple yarders who look in the cab and just cringe, they are afraid to start them up, too many leavers and buttons.
Leaves it to old wornout wrench's like me to keep them running

I know this is about excavators but a dragline is just a big excavator so I thought this information may be interesting to some. Just scale it down a bit for an excavator. It is amusing sometimes how different companys operate. One will want to over truck an excavator so the excavator has no wait time.Then the next one will under truck so they don't have a truck waiting.

Also this is not so much about machine performance as operator performance and machine setup.

This is as bad as a seminar I was at one time put on by a major equipment manufacturer. It was a presentation on lubricants and hydraulic. It was explained how the fluids should be strained through a 1.0 micron filter before being put into the machine's engine, hydraulic system, final drives and the like. The filtering was being required because the fluids coming from the supplier were not clean enough after the refining and manufacturing process. I politely asked the presenter of the seminar if it was okay if we took our machines out in the dirt anymore since the engine lubricating system, hydraulic system and the like were not sealed, but free breathing and that air born contaminants such as dust, pollen and the like could enter the systems of the machine. You can't believe the dumb look I got back as an answer.

The computer geeks they hire who have never been on or around a machine have to think of all kinds of things to add to use up the computer memory such as allowing the operator to set the speeds of the various function on the machine. One of two things happens with this. Either an operator never touches the damn thing while a different will spend all damned day long fooling and playing with the thing which will waste more time then he will save changing functions speeds. What a wonderful geek world we live in.

Yair . . . Spot on Greg. As I mentioned up thread I believe machinery in general reached an adequate degree of "performance" a generation ago.

Since then the industry has allowed the geeks to introduce a huge degree of complication and high hour unreliability for very minor improvements in "production", some significant improvements in operator comfort and a general "dumbing down" of the basic skills needed to operate a machine.

Have a look at "Murl's Video"again. Imagine putting todays operators on tandem bowl string operated scrapers with a PCU hanging of the front of the crankshaft of the tractor. . . yet those blokes were probably moving as much dirt per hour as a current spread and the working life of those machines was in excess of forty years.

The thing is all the soft spoiled pussy-cats would be better off if all the B/S never happened and they had to learn to operate machines like men. There is nothing like a broken cable on a scraper that has to be re-reeved by the bloke who broke it to teach that elusive thing called "finesse".

Bit of a rant there but I have just been listening in on a job and some poor feller spat the dummy because the A/C quit and the boss apparently told the fitter to pull the glass in the cab because the machine is going back to Rocky for a refit, sandblast and paint over Christmas . . . it's some sort of dozer and they really need to buy that bloke a box of tissues, he's still crying. (I'm laughing)

Cheers

You touched on my main objection to all of it right there, once these machines get
a few years on them, they all have problems. The old ones had fewer and more common components, but I can easily see the manufacturers saying, "I'm sorry we no longer support that software. We will be happy to sell you this newer machine, we'll probably support this one another 4 or 5 years."

Scrub Puller said:

In the real world does a two second improvement to a swingers cycle time make any difference?



I spend a lot of time looking at job sites through 20x50 Nikons on a tripod and I can say for certain that lack of decent kick-arse management negates potential ten or fifteen second improvements in the time it takes to load a truck . . .
I see it all the time and wonder about this fixation on "performance".

Click to expand...

On the other side of this coin is that pennies equates to nickels, dimes and eventually dollars. Every little bit helps. I think the manufacturer should do some R&D and testing of their equipment. They should know the cycle times, fuel consumption et el. It relates to profits. And if company ABC choices not to use the avaialable information, so be it.

I relation to decent kick arse management versus ten or fifteen seconds of improvement on performance levels. I will take the 10-15 seconds performance levels all day long. I prefer to work smart and not hard. I prefer my machines to do the grunt work and not my people. Our work force is getting more educated (half my mechanics has degrees), are wanting to work to work on the higher tech items and my guys dont do well by pushing them hard just to push them. They are smart enough to pull together when the chips are down without my "breathing down thier necks" pushing them to go faster.

Just my .02 cents..........

Greg said:

This is as bad as a seminar I was at one time put on by a major equipment manufacturer. It was a presentation on lubricants and hydraulic. It was explained how the fluids should be strained through a 1.0 micron filter before being put into the machine's engine, hydraulic system, final drives and the like. The filtering was being required because the fluids coming from the supplier were not clean enough after the refining and manufacturing process. I politely asked the presenter of the seminar if it was okay if we took our machines out in the dirt anymore since the engine lubricating system, hydraulic system and the like were not sealed, but free breathing and that air born contaminants such as dust, pollen and the like could enter the systems of the machine. You can't believe the dumb look I got back as an answer.

The computer geeks they hire who have never been on or around a machine have to think of all kinds of things to add to use up the computer memory such as allowing the operator to set the speeds of the various function on the machine. One of two things happens with this. Either an operator never touches the damn thing while a different will spend all damned day long fooling and playing with the thing which will waste more time then he will save changing functions speeds. What a wonderful geek world we live in.

Click to expand...

I just came back from a STLE three day class on oil sampling and best practices and we were challanged to go back and do a ISO 4406 sample on our new hydraulic and engine oil. I took them up on the challange and I was shocked on what my oil came back on. 51,800PPM >4 7409 >6 352>14. This is on NEW oil. After seeing that, I was a believer and I installed a 1 micorn filter on my bulk tank, bacon bombed my bulk tanks, installed a pad lock on my bulk tanks and made sure that my oil fill buckets were enclosed and stored properly. I also installed 1 micorn breathers on my tanks to keep the dirt out of my oils.

I just came back from the CAT Proving Grounds last month and looked at one of their programable machines. I personally liked the functions.

We doube trip our machines, so I am going to purchase a machine with a programable functions that also has lock out features. I personally think the programmable machines are going to be an asset to our fleet.

Scrub, I hear what you're saying, but there's more to it than just cycle times. Management is a focus point all on its own. There are plenty of people who wrack their brains trying to improve efficiency on the management side of things. We just don't talk about management much here. It's not one or the other. You need efficiency on every front.

If an excavator has a 20 second cycle time and you improve it by 2 seconds, that's 10%. If the machine is kept for 10,000 hrs before it is replaced, the machine would have performed 1,000 hrs more worth of work (assuming that management is equally bad in both cases).

Yair . . . Interesting FMD. So what's gone wrong?

The technology, oils, and filtration of the 1960's allowed us to get ten to fifteen thousand component hours on 8h's and 9G's on the toughest application crawler tractors have ever been put into . . . that is to say, continuous WOT, second gear operation with high shock loads, often in heavy dust requiring two air elements per day.

In addition fuel was drum stock often prepositioned in the paddock out in the weather . . . no additional filtration other than that on the machines.

This is all part of my contention that machine simplicity and lifetime reliability has been compromised for inconsequential "improvements" in performance.

There is no doubt todays engines burn less fuel but less fuel and emissions have come at a hell of a cost.

By "kick-arse management" I mean get back to the basics.

In the last few years I have seen scrapers loading north and hauling south for no reason other than the "boys started that way this morning".

All the time I see trucks banking up on excavators that take eight or ten passes to load a tandem dump . . . haven't these site managers heard of bulking out with dozer and getting a decent loader in to stack the trucks?

And get a section cut to grade and finished instead of going back three or four times . . . . graaaghh.

I could go on but that's enough of a rant. (he grins)

Cheers.

Scrub Puller said:

Yair . . . Interesting FMD. So what's gone wrong?

The technology, oils, and filtration of the 1960's allowed us to get ten to fifteen thousand component hours on 8h's and 9G's on the toughest application crawler tractors have ever been put into . . . that is to say, continuous WOT, second gear operation with high shock loads, often in heavy dust requiring two air elements per day.

In addition fuel was drum stock often prepositioned in the paddock out in the weather . . . no additional filtration other than that on the machines.

This is all part of my contention that machine simplicity and lifetime reliability has been compromised for inconsequential "improvements" in performance.

There is no doubt todays engines burn less fuel but less fuel and emissions have come at a hell of a cost.

By "kick-arse management" I mean get back to the basics.

In the last few years I have seen scrapers loading north and hauling south for no reason other than the "boys started that way this morning".

All the time I see trucks banking up on excavators that take eight or ten passes to load a tandem dump . . . haven't these site managers heard of bulking out with dozer and getting a decent loader in to stack the trucks?

And get a section cut to grade and finished instead of going back three or four times . . . . graaaghh.

I could go on but that's enough of a rant. (he grins)

Cheers.

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I am not in construction. However in my world, I remember doing inframes on Cummins 855's every 300,000-400,000 miles. Warranties were 12 months or 100,000 miles. 3 MPG. My brand new personal cars were one year warranties. Chanaging points and condensors every year.

Today I would be very upset if I have to do an inframe with anything less of 750,000 miles (most times its the one million mile mark). Clutches are lasting us 750,000 miles in our class 8 tractors. I have a vast majority of my excavators with 25,000 hours and no main pumps or engine rebuild. Extended oil drains. Easier diagnosing with the help of pc based programs. My work force is getting smarter and yeah, believe it or not, with lots of work ethics............My new cars are now coming with 6 years 100,000 mile warranties. My 1999 F-150 has 250,000 miles on it and never had the valve covers or oil pan off it and it is still going.

Perhaps I see the world through a different set of bifolds..............

Yair . . . joispoi. got you with that, makes sense. FMD Fair enough mate, I have been shot down in flames.

I hasten to add that around here there are folks who don't share you positive assessment of the present technology. (he grins)

Cheers

Scrub Puller said:

In the real world does a two second improvement to a swingers cycle time make any difference?

Click to expand...

In a word - YES. A dozen times over.

I've got documented field studies where cutting 2 seconds off the bucket filling time on a large wheel loader resulted in a 12% production tonnage increase and saved 9% in fuel consumed. Now I'd ask anyone here that if I did something to your personal vehicle that meant every time you went to the fuel station you'd put put 9% less fuel in it when you filled the tank but on the other side I could give you a 12% performance increase you'd bite my arm off up to the ankle - correct .......??

Completely agree with FMD about lubricants. Improve oil cleanliness and your components will last longer, often up to twice as long for very little investment in filtration equipment. We're currently investing around $200k in recirculating filter systems for our lube bulk tanks for a fleet of equipment worth 9 figures in dollar terms. Oil companies CAN get new oil "clean" (minimum ISO 16/13 at least) but if you want that you have to pay for it on every load of oil you buy from them. Far better to put the filtration in on the maintenance shop tanks and do the filtering yourself. In the long run it's cheaper.

Sorry Scrub, but back in the bad old days (which I personally remember well) machines were in truth very low tech and really didn't do the amount of work that todays machines are capable of doing (please note my choice of words there). 15k hours of work on an old D9G could probably be done in less than half of those hours on a modern 10T using less fuel to boot. BTW, our 10T's went 17k hours to powertrain rebuild, and the finals that came out of them looked good as new, as did the trannys and the converters.

Good management of equipment operation counts for a lot, as does good maintenance. Especially in the kind of places I work that's always a challenge.

The comment about over or under-trucking an excavator really depends on the answer to the same question on any job site - "are you short on excavators or short on trucks?"

Yair . . . Gotcha Nige. My comments were directed more at general civil construction than mining . . . man I'd love to see how a couple of D10's would shape up in the scrub though.

I suspect eight hundred feet of Esco square link and a couple of hundred thousand acres of Ooline and Blackbutt would find their failings. (he grins)

Cheers

Boy my first post sure seems to have stirred up a hornets next here. This conversation goes to show that we are certainly in a one size does not fit all world here.

A previous post here states that a company is running a "nine figure" fleet of equipment and is installing a $200,000.00 recirculating filtering system for their various oils which they purchase by the truck load. There are many small contractors who's whole fleet does not have the value of the filtering system this particular fleet operator is putting in. Some one else is putting one micron filters on their storage tanks. The hydraulic and lubrication systems on the equipment they operate is still free breathing, not sealed and in short order is going to become contaminated with airborne contaminants.

As far as the computerized control features which I previously mentioned, it is simply not required for the type of work I used to do and many other contractors are in the same boat. The smaller jobs are not set up for GPS and in many cases it is up to the grading contractor to do a lot of "design build," meaning the plans give some basic grading information and it is to the excavator to "make things work." More times then not when doing underground work I have found that the drawings and design is wrong because it was done based on the last design and engineering work done and it was not built according to those drawings and specifications and no "as built" drawings were produced. Case in point, the type of work I did could not utilize GPS and didn't need "programmable machines." All those features added to a machine simply drives up the price of the machine to the point that many contractors can't justify buying such a machine or simply can't afford it. Further the features are not going to be used. Case in point, programmable blade control on a dozer.

As for one D10T being able to do the work of two D9G's or H's I have a tough time with that one. That statement was made in here and I will go out on a limb and say it came from someone without a lot of seat time. I know what my equipment produced when watching the new machines across the fence from me on a job numerous times.

Even though I wear Caterpillar underwear I don't feel that they have in a lot of ways communicated with their total customer base in a lot of ways in trying to find out what they want in a machine. I think that all of the manufacturers are guilty of the same offense.

Greg said:

A previous post here states that a company is running a "nine figure" fleet of equipment and is installing a $200,000.00 recirculating filtering system for their various oils which they purchase by the truck load. There are many small contractors who's whole fleet does not have the value of the filtering system this particular fleet operator is putting in. Some one else is putting one micron filters on their storage tanks. The hydraulic and lubrication systems on the equipment they operate is still free breathing, not sealed and in short order is going to become contaminated with airborne contaminants.

As far as the computerized control features which I previously mentioned, it is simply not required for the type of work I used to do and many other contractors are in the same boat. The smaller jobs are not set up for GPS and in many cases it is up to the grading contractor to do a lot of "design build," meaning the plans give some basic grading information and it is to the excavator to "make things work." More times then not when doing underground work I have found that the drawings and design is wrong because it was done based on the last design and engineering work done and it was not built according to those drawings and specifications and no "as built" drawings were produced. Case in point, the type of work I did could not utilize GPS and didn't need "programmable machines." All those features added to a machine simply drives up the price of the machine to the point that many contractors can't justify buying such a machine or simply can't afford it. Further the features are not going to be used. Case in point, programmable blade control on a dozer.

As for one D10T being able to do the work of two D9G's or H's I have a tough time with that one. That statement was made in here and I will go out on a limb and say it came from someone without a lot of seat time. I know what my equipment produced when watching the new machines across the fence from me on a job numerous times.

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I think I need to clarify a couple of points here. First my comments are applied to large-scale open-pit mining, not construction. The world of mining is totally different to construction, of which I have no experience. So having said that, here goes ....

What I actually said was ....... back in the bad old days (which I personally remember well) machines were in truth very low tech and really didn't do the amount of work that todays machines are capable of doing (please note my choice of words there).

A D9G or H has/had 410BHP, was equipped with a 14.0cu.m. blade and ran at 4km/h in 1st forward, 6.9km/h in 2nd reverse which are the 2 gears that most large dozers tend to use while pushing bulk materials. A D10T has 580BHP, is equipped with an 18.5cu.m. blade and runs at 4km/h in 1st forward, 9km/h in 2nd reverse. Crunch a few numbers on cubic metres per pass multplied by cycle times for a 50-metre push cycle (because of the larger blade and higher reverse speed of the 10T) an you'll see that the 10T will move about twice what the 9H will move. And that's before I get on to the subject that the high-drive tractors in generally have better traction and push better than low-drive tractors do...........

Filtering bulk oil to what would years ago have been "super-clean" (I shoot for ISO 14/11 or better on new oils compared to the factory's 16/13 target recommendation) again I have documented evidence that the life of components increases by a factor of anything from 1.25 to 2. Now if I have a fleet of 34 trucks and a Final Drive overhaul costs about $60k each, if I can take that overhaul from 15k hours to 20k then over the 100k hours life of each truck it saves me $240k/truck or $8+m for the fleet. Numbers like that, so long as I can actually deliver them in the real world, are what generates my Christmas bonus every year thanks very much.

Ref your comment The hydraulic and lubrication systems on the equipment they operate is still free breathing, not sealed and in short order is going to become contaminated with airborne contaminants. Where did that come from..? All the machines I work with are either completely sealed hydraulic systems or if they are open to atmosphere the breather is a replaceable 2-micron element.

In gold (or any other type of base metal mining) mining we use high-precision GPS with an in-cab display that shows red or green simply to keep the tractors & shovels on grade so that nobody from Survey has to go out staking huge areas to keep to levels that are probably +/- a mile compared to the levels that construction contractors have to work to. However it does keep people away from machines for the bulk of the time.

I don't quite bleed Yellow when you cut me...... My favourite expression when something happens is "That's a Cat design feature, that is. Designed to f**k you up" .............. they aren't the be-all and end-all of machinery but they are still the standard against which everyone else appears to measure themselves.

Nige,

I come from the opposite end of you. No mining experience here, only construction. We don't run around the clock, seven days a week. When I was active it was ten to 12 hours a day, five days, sometimes six from April 1 to usually end of November then locked it up for the winter. Therefore increased productivity by shorter cycle time is a factor here but not as much as in your case. In my case if a scraper could make an additional cycle per hour, that added up to and additional 20 yards an hour and 200 yards in a day. Not small potatoes the end of a five day week which comes to an additional 1,000 yards moved.

When you look at a small fleet which is what I had it is impossible to justify, or even afford to install high tech continuous filtering systems for engine and hydraulic oil when it is being purchased at the rate of a 55 gallon barrel or two at a time. As far as sealed as opposed to free breathing systems, you and I are working with two entirely different classes of equipment here.

As for GPS, I never needed to know the precise position of every piece of equipment every second. For the most part I could see the entire job site and could see where each machine was. Like I said before, GPS for grading was not a factor as many times these were "design build" projects where the contractor was expected to "make it work" by himself. That may not sound very scientific, but on the type of work I did it was the norm at least half of the time. Further I could not justify the cost of GPS equipment for the machines and the support equipment to get the data from the specifications and drawings into the GPS equipment.

Like I said before. This is not a one size fits all. You have a place to use these things and a way to justify where I did not and could not.

Greg, I take your point completely. We can talk in savings of telephone numbers, but then again our equipment purchase/maintenance budget it itself an even bigger telephone number. For a guy with a business at the opposite end of the scale the first thing is first to understand the theory/logic behind some or all of the points discussed above, define their relevance to the actual business itself and then apply what makes sense to that particular business. In those terms you're probably looking at saving a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, but if those savings are the difference between successfully bidding jobs (allied to more reliable equipment) then I'd personally say it would be worth it.