Reducing whole life costs is the aim of
"Cat used to offer a quarry specific truck body but moved away from that strategy some years ago but is reintroducing it, with a new design, to meet customer demand," said Caterpillar quarry and construction truck application specialist Dave Ellington.
Cat currently offers two types of body - a flat floor one and a dual slope body. The choice between these is application specific. A flat floor body is often used in quarries where you are metering material loaded into the crusher, whereas the V-shaped dual slope body is aimed more at construction to encourage centre loading and where higher grade capabilities are needed Usually different liners are used to cope with the different materials in each application and typically last 15 to 20,000 hours, depending on the abrasiveness of the aggregates.
The quarry body extends the body offering with a one piece floor that should last the life of the truck and removes the need for liners and the cost and time involved in replacing them. The new body is aimed at quarries with soft to medium material, particularly limestone or materials with a specific gravity in the region of 1650kg/m3.
All parts of the quarry body that will come into contact with the load are made from 400 Brunel steel and are thicker than on standard bodies. The standard bodies have a 10mm subfloor and liner, whereas the quarry body has a 40mm floor.
According to Cat regional industry manager for Northern and Central Europe Markus Gebauer, the higher Brunel rating adds higher wear characteristics but is also more brittle. "It is a trade off of wear against brittleness, so it is not a case of just increasing the Brunel rating across all of our truck body range," he said. "However, the 400 Brunel steel is easier to repair in the field. The aim of the reintroduction is to reduce whole life costs."
The new option is currently available on the 770F and will soon be available on the 775F, while a 772F version is expected to be launched in the third quarter of this year.
The bodies will be made in Mexico at the same production facility as the other truck bodies.
According to Ellington, the new launch is all part of Cat's strategy to optimise loads for the best results. "In the past we have offered more options, but now we are focusing on products that help customers to optimise their hauling," he said. "We recognise that not every payload will be equal, which is why we use target payload values in our equipment specifications - the 770 has a target payload of 40tonnes but is capable of loads up to 43tonnes. We don't recommend that customers continually load to this weight, but recommend that they aim never to be more than 10% under or 10% over the target payload any more than 20% of the time in order to achieve the optimum from their hauling."
