Volvo CE
You know how it feels when you see a bottleneck of haul trucks on your site — knowing they’re lined up waiting to be loaded, all while fuel continues to burn, machine hours tick away, and your costs go up minute by minute.
It’s a real situation on construction sites all across North America, and there’s no one-size-fits-all with matching haul trucks and excavators to optimize cycle times, as many different factors influence each operation’s unique needs. But if you currently own one of our largest articulated haulers, the A60H, you should take a closer look at our new EC950F crawler excavator. When working together, this pair optimizes cycle times to help decrease your operating expenses.
HOW OUR EC950F EXCAVATORS AND A60H HAULERS WORK TOGETHER TO IMPROVE EFFICIENCY
For owners of large articulated haulers, we designed the 95-ton EC950F excavator to pair with them. In fact, it can fill our 60-ton A60H haul truck in four bucket passes with an average cycle time of just over a minute. It’s well-equipped to keep your haulers moving.
Profitability is all about faster cycle times and efficiency, and fewer passes is the key to unlocking both. The typical rule of thumb is four to five passes for loading a truck — any more than that is inefficient. Loading in fewer passes lowers your operating costs because you’re limiting idle time, which means you’re burning less fuel, slowing down service intervals, and putting less wear and tear on your machines. Loader fatigue is also a factor. Operators loading trucks are constantly moving, and the fewer trips they have to make, the less fatigue they’ll have throughout the day.
A short boom and short arm configuration on the EC950F can utilize a 10 yd3 bucket — that’s five times bigger than an average 20-ton machine (the most popular size you’d see working alongside a road). What’s more, the bucket size can be even bigger depending on the loading material and job conditions. Improving loading efficiency further, the longer track base and heavier counterweight allows the EC950F to run a larger bucket further from the machine.
It’s true that maneuverability — being able to move trucks or excavators from job to job — can impact the viability of the EC950F and A60H on a site. These machines are massive. Smaller trucks and excavators do provide more maneuverability, but they also increase the number of passes required to get the job done. On the flip side, an EC950F isn’t really a good pairing with an A45G because a customer will end up burning more fuel versus using a smaller machine such as an EC750. It comes down to efficiency and sizing the proper size loading tool to your truck fleet.
Matching excavators to your haul trucks lowers your total cost of ownership (TCO) on both machines. In most situations, you’ll burn extra fuel when you have too big or small of an excavator or too big or small of haul trucks. If your haulers are too small, you’ll need more of them to match up with the excavator’s productivity — which again, costs more and burns more fuel. Some customers have found success running two A60H haulers to do the same work as three A40s or A45s. And when you look at an A45G versus an A60H, the A60H doesn’t burn that much more fuel — it’s only about three to four more gallons per hour in most situations. When an A60H is a good fit for an operation, those customers are getting more efficient cycle times without burning much more fuel.
CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT FEATURES MAKE THE DIFFERENCE FOR RANGO, INC.
Rango Inc., a mining contractor out of Mesa, Arizona, is currently utilizing the EC950F with multiple A60H haulers on one site. They chose a Volvo excavator because one of their primary concerns was excessive wear on the bucket and arm due to abrasive sandy and dusty conditions. The arm on their EC950F is designed with a unique floating pin system on the bucket connection — the grease-enveloped floating pins pivot back and forth when using the bucket. This provides more even wear and extends pin life to decrease their maintenance costs. Without this system, Rango’s repair costs would increase significantly in this type of harsh working environment.
On the A60H side, they’re getting better tractive effort than competitive trucks because of Volvo’s Automatic Traction Control (ATC) system. Some competitors use a limited-slip system, but the Volvo ATC kicks in when in automatic mode, giving their operators better tractive effort in the driveline without them having to engage any buttons. Our dog clutch system gives 100% driveline lockup when the button is engaged in the floorboard. With it, they get better control of drive combinations and superior traction in sandy (or even muddy) conditions.
Harsh conditions also make the Volvo Lifetime Frame and Structure Warranty on the haul truck and excavator frames appealing. Currently, we’re the only ones in the industry who offer this across both our excavator and hauler lineups.
To learn more about how these machines boost productivity and lower operating costs in mining, check out the additional information we’ve provided about the EC950F and A60H perfect pair on our website.
Eric Fatyol – Product Manager, Articulated Haulers
Eric has over 20 years of experience in the construction equipment business holding various sales, sales management and product management roles both at the dealership and manufacturer level. He has been with Volvo Construction Equipment for the past eight years in a product manager role, with the last five years focused on Volvo articulated haulers.
Sejong Ko – Product Manager, Excavators
Sejong started designing excavators in 1995 and has worked for Volvo for over 25 years. Today, Sejong’s role at Volvo has him planning and managing the large excavator product portfolio, collecting customer feedback on what they want to see in the next generation of excavators and spreading the word about Volvo’s latest excavator technologies.
