Eclipse® Solid Points on a 35 Cubic Yard Bucket

A coal company, operating a surface strip mine located in South Central Alberta, Canada found they were experiencing performance problems with GET on their two 35 cubic yard buckets. The buckets were fitted with two lip assemblies using old technology resulting in under performing GET. They found they were needing to change out their existing points every 4-8 days, resulting in considerable downtime for maintenance.

Bradken was selected to refurbish the lip assemblies in order to improve bucket performance and extend service life.

The Bradken fabrication shop located in Edmonton completed refurbishment of the two dragline bucket lip assemblies and provided a new GET solution consisting of Bradken’s Eclipse® Solid Points (PPS9BHPSA), combined with a PLPS9HB mechanical lock system to better suit the digging conditions.

Bradken Eclipse® Solid points resulted in a longer service life with an average of 298,700 BCM per set of points.

The average life span of Bradken’s Eclipse® Solid points was 14-20 days, depending on digging conditions. This was a dramatic improvement compared to the previous competitor's points that lasted only 4-8 days on average.

In addition, the GET change-out time has been reduced after using the Bradken PLPS9HB mechanical lock system.

Over a year a total of 150 hours downtime was saved in using the Bradken GET when compared to the competitor GET system.