![]() As the price of fuel goes up, the cost efficiency of the electric-drive dozer will get even better and also allow contractors to continue to use the right machine for the application rather than switch to excavators and artics or other machines to save on diesel costs on short-distance applications.Įven something as innocuous as the amount of rain in a season or the diligence with which you do maintenance can have a measurable impact on undercarriage life and lifecycle costs. Since the engine operates in a much narrower rpm band, it should also last longer between rebuilds. The company anticipates the D7E will deliver up to a 20-percent improvement in fuel consumption with 10-percent lower lifetime owning and operating costs, Heiar says. The D7E isn’t a hybrid with a dual power source but rather uses a diesel engine that powers a generator that energizes a solid state power inverter and electric motor, replacing the traditional torque converter and transmission. One intriguing solution coming down the pipeline is electric-drive equipment.Ĭaterpillar unveiled an electric-drive D7E dozer at the ConExpo/ConAgg trade show this spring and plans to start selling them in 2009. If fuel costs continue to rise, contractors will have to rethink what types of machines they use in moving material. ![]() These early warning systems not only save you from expensive catastrophic failure, they give you a bigger window of opportunity to schedule the downtime and replacement machines. But rather than push a component right up to the edge of failure, take advantage of some of the new monitoring systems to diagnose and alert you to a problem long before the machine’s performance or components start to suffer. The best bang for the buck on big dozers comes from condition-based maintenance, Hansen says. Your goal in good maintenance should be to increase uptime rather than trim costs. These on average turn out to be about 2 percent of your O&O costs on a D11 and 4 percent on a D6. ![]() Other than the undercarriage considerations, it’s not worth a lot of effort to try to substantially lower your maintenance costs beyond just following good preventive maintenance practices. These machine control systems insure that you only move dirt once and maximize the return on your owning and operating costs because they eliminate errors and rework. Saving money on the cab is really penny wise and pound foolish.”Īnd don’t forget about GPS. “But you can look at the charts and see how important operator comfort is to productivity. ![]() “Twenty years ago, a lot of contractors bought machines without cabs,” Dietz says. Likewise a good cab and ergonomic controls boost productivity. A well-trained operator will also take better care of the undercarriage and extend its life. A good operator spends less time blading air and more time moving dirt, Hansen says, and at the end of the day may produce 10 or 20 percent more work for the same amount of wages and fuel expended. The more fuel you’re burning, the more material you’re moving, so high fuel consumption is not necessarily a bad thing, Hansen says.īy giving your operators advanced training in dozer techniques you can increase the amount of work they do without increasing what you’re paying them. Understand first, however, that fuel burned equals work done. There is not much you can do about the price of either, but there is plenty you can do to maximize the productivity and profit you get from these costs. Wages and diesel account for 75 percent of your operating costs for a D6T and 80 percent for a D11T. Every undercarriage needs to be custom designed, Neeley says, which is why Cat dealers offer what they call their Custom Track Service that takes all these variables into account, runs them through a spreadsheet calculator that shows you what the different options do to your undercarriage lifecycle and cost per hour. Either way, the choice of one component in your track will influence your choices for the rest of the components. Others may benefit from a long-life pin and bushing assembly like Cat’s SystemOne. For some it may make more financial sense to run their pins and bushings to destruction. There’s no one universal solution for everybody. The catch is that every choice you make in spec’ing an undercarriage is going to end up changing the operating costs and the amount of downtime. These can be replaced or refurbished in separate maintenance procedures, but most contractors don’t want to pull the machine out of the dirt so often. In an ideal world all the undercarriage parts would wear out about the same time, but they don’t. “Picking the right undercarriage and good undercarriage maintenance are critical to achieving the lowest operating cost per hour,” Neeley says.
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