EX5500 Crawler Shoes

A customer in the Central West of the USA was operating a number of EX5500 Hydraulic excavators in their hard rock conditions.

The OEM shoes were typically achieving an acceptable service life of 18,000 to 20,000 hours, however they had experienced issues with some crawler shoes breaking prior to this service life end, resulting in unplanned downtime and replacement crawler shoes costs.

Bradken Crawler Shoes were installed onto one of their EX5500 excavators. These Crawler Shoes feature Bradken’s patented ‘Pillar of Strength which provides greater Structural integrity to prevent crushing of the roller path as the crawler shoes wear, and the use of Bradken’s proprietary through-hardened alloy, which delivers increased wear life in many hard rock applications compared with case hardened crawler shoes.

The Bradken Crawler Shoes achieved a service life of 26,000 hours with no shoe breakages. This was a 37% improvement in service life over the OEM shoes. Following the success of the Bradken Crawler shoes, the customer selected bradken to supply further undercarriage components for their EX5500 machines.

The following chart reports the difference in the pin and pin lug wear rates on the EX5500 undercarriages at this site.