Overhauling haul road maintenance

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

This phrase, while overused, offers an interesting point. There is something to be said about people who look at their current situation and make choices that decrease future risk or increase the potential for prospective payoff.

The true sentiment of the advice applies to a broad range of topics – including haul road maintenance. Haul road maintenance can easily be categorized as an unavoidable expense. And while it is a fact that haul roads must be maintained, there are ways to decrease ongoing costs with preventive maintenance and boost efficiency in the process – kind of like a person who eats an apple occasionally or lives a generally healthy lifestyle to lower their medical bills.

Through preventive maintenance, operations can address areas that may seem small in the present moment but reduce risk of more significant downtime and headaches in the future. A key is to incorporate equipment that helps operations realize the long-term benefits.

Tread lightly on tires

Every minute an operation spends on active haul road maintenance – clearing debris or bringing in additional material to repair the effects of wash boarding – takes a minute away from producing and generating revenue.

Mining operations can shell out more than $25,000 to replace just one tire on a haul truck. Poorly maintained roads are harder on tires, causing them to wear out faster.

Not only does this force more frequent replacements, which subsequently increase costs, but damaged tires impact operator safety because a haul truck operating on even one problematic tire can easily go out of control without warning.

Adopting preventive haul road maintenance practices that keep roads in good condition significantly reduces costly risks. Additionally, they offer greater capacity for operations to focus on production and profit, rather than diverting resources to repair roads and replace tires.

Tailgates and custom truck bodies are two custom haul truck solutions that offer a significant benefit to tire life while addressing a number of other avoidable risks.

Don’t pave the haul road with payload

Good haul road health starts with prevention.

Many haul roads contain an incline, so naturally, gravity pushes material to the back of the truck beds. When operations use standard off-the-shelf truck bodies, whether driving on the steep part of the haul road or not, material spillage is common because the truck body is not optimized for the material it’s hauling and the open back allows gravity and bumps to slide material off the back onto the haul road.

Haul truck customizations can address this issue and significantly reduce spillage. Tailgates added to a standard haul truck, for example, allow operations to maximize capacity without risking material spillage.

Without a tailgate, operators tend to adjust their loading strategy to decrease the amount of material they place in the truck while moving the loading target to the front of the body to prevent spillage. Because of this, trucks often carry 10 to 20 percent less than their rated capacity, and the additional weight in front leads to faster front tire wear. This is simply not affordable.

For example, consider a haul truck rated for 70 tons that carries an average of three loads per hour. If that truck is hauling 12 percent less than its rated capacity, it can haul more than 200 additional tons of saleable material over the course of an eight-hour day with the simple addition of a tailgate.

While tailgates provide an excellent option to address spillage, mines can fully maximize hauling capabilities by replacing an OEM’s standard haul truck body with a custom-engineered body designed to fit the specific needs of the operation.

Standard haul trucks are built with the premise of all materials possessing the same material density, resulting in a one-size-fits-all approach. Alternatively, custom truck bodies take all aspects of the operation into account, recognizing that properties of iron ore differ from those of overburden, coal or fly ash.

Custom bodies, optimized specifically for the properties of the material to be hauled, ensure maximum payload capacity. In mining, density varies significantly depending on the material being extracted. Custom truck bodies prevent hauling below capacity level simply because space in a standard design is too limited to reach the gross vehicle weight with lightweight material.

Custom truck bodies are also designed to address spillage and ensure that the material stays in the truck and does not spill out the back or sides onto the haul road. They are engineered to match the body shape to the mine’s material, loading equipment and haul road inclines to ensure the truck body is optimal for all aspects of the operation.

« Prev Page 1 2 Next Page »