Three Easy Ways to Get More Life From Your Buckets
In the Northern United States, December through March is the typical shutdown and repair season for the aggregate / sand and gravel industries.
Your excavator bucket is caught between a rock and a hard place every day. Regardless if it fails over time, or is suddenly destroyed, you have to scramble to get it running ASAP.
It may be hard to identify this mangled pile of metal as a small excavator bucket.
Using this small bucket on a more powerful excavator, an untrained operator used it attempting to pry a boulder loose.
While attempting to rebuild this particular bucket in the above photo doesn’t make economic sense, here are ways JADCO can assist you in rebuilding your buckets, to help survive abuse from clueless operators.
Three Ways JADCO Delivers Longer Bucket Life
1. Extra Wide Replacement Bucket Bottom
This demolition bucket was rebuilt using JADCO QT-PLUS ® for the replacement bottom, shape cut side plates and wear bars.
Notice how the edge of the new bottom projects out 1” past the bucket sides. This gives superior wear protection in a vulnerable area of any bucket, regardless of size.
2. Bucket Bottom Wear Bars
Most new excavator buckets have wear bars on the underside of the bucket. The bars can vary in thickness, depending on the bucket size, weight and material they remove. Typical aggregate bucket wear bars range from ½” to 1” thick. Hard rock mining buckets have heavier wear bars.
When an operator fills the bucket, it encounters high stress grinding abrasion to the bottom wear bars every time. Commodity AR steel bars that are not hard all the way through, and are often worn out in less than one season.
The white arrow shows how thin the OEM bars have worn. Notice the red arrow highlighting the missing end where the bar broke off. The customer replaced these parts with QT-PLUS ®.
3. Formed Inner Wear Liners Vs. Flat Bars
Some shops attempt to cut corners by welding in flat bars in place for an inside bucket liner, rather than have a formed liner that fits smoothly to the existing bucket. Liners in a newer bucket are a good idea to save the original structure. Welding flat plates in place for a D-I-Y bottom is not where to save money.
BEFORE: Customer welded flat plates in place to make an inside liner. They didn’t realize the joining weld metal is softer than the wear plate. They were trying to save money rather than ordering a formed bucket.
AFTER: The same bucket just 4-months later: The joining welds washed out, allowing the sand and gravel to wear into the now unprotected edges of the flat wear plates. This wasted down time when they could least afford to have it shut down for repairs.
What should you do instead? Here is a one-piece liner formed to match the bucket bottom, rather than the multiple plates shown in the prior example. Using QT-PLUS ® delivers 4 to 5 times longer wear life than commodity (steel warehouse) AR steel.
At JADCO, We Realize An Educated Customer Understands The Value In Long Equipment Life, Vs. Low Initial Cost.
Because what you know makes you money.
What you don’t know loses your money!
“Every time I have been arrogant, I have lost money. Because when I’m arrogant, I believe that what I don’t know, is not important. It is just the opposite.”
– Paraphrased from ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ by Robert Kyosaki.
You have likely experienced arrogant people masquerading their ignorance with bluster, bullying and bravado. Humility is the attitude of knowledge and wisdom.
Don’t fall for high pressure sales tactics from people who do not have the correct products or knowledge to solve your wear challenges.
For the last 45 years JADCO has focused exclusively on delivering consistent, longer equipment life for our customers.
JADCO’s QT-PLUS ® delivers greater performance IN YOUR MOST CHALLENGING WEAR APPLICATIONS than the various AR400 steel plates you have used previously.
Being able to create wear resistant steel having the same hardness through the entire thickness of the steel, demands you accurately control the alloying chemistry with precise heat treating.
Doesn’t Every Steel Company Make Their Wear Plate Last As Long As JADCO QT-PLUS ®?
The quick answer is No; although the attention to alloy content required at the steel mill is available to anyone. Yet most wear plate distributors choose to reduce the proper quantities and percentages of these essential alloying elements, to get a lower selling price.
When you cut back on these critical alloys, wear life drops, and it is always the customer who suffers.
We are able to deliver better results to our customers, because we think differently. How? By strictly focusing on improving your current results.
Allow us to help you today by emailing us at info@jadcomfg.com or calling (724) 452-5252.
We will schedule a meeting with one of our local wear plate specialists at a time that best fits your schedule.
Remember, the only thing you have to lose by not working with JADCO, are your profits.
When your flat back elbows give out, give JADCO a shout!
