{{image2-a:r-w:200}}KVX ground engaging tools (GET) are now widely used on excavators in the demolition and recycling sectors in South Australia, and have been used successfully for a number of years by Divall’s Earthmoving and Bulk Haulage in New South Wales for excavators feeding crushers with material for recycling, plus virgin quarry materials.
KVX has also recently been commissioned by contractor Delta Group for its demolition and recycling operations, with positive results.
Chris Guntner, KVX regional sales manager for Oceania, said feedback from customers indicated they appreciated the longer life, reduced downtime and excellent physical retention of KVX’s adapter-less, weld-free configuration.
He said, unlike other GET products on the market, all elements in KVX GET are forged or rolled rather than cast, and are bolt-on rather than welded.
“This ensures significantly greater toughness, strength and abrasion resistance, for much longer wear life, and vastly improved tooth retention reliability,” Gunter said. “It is virtually unheard of for a KVX tooth to fall off a bucket into a crusher.
“This makes the product ideal for recycling and demolition applications, which often involve harsh and abrasive products being fed directly into crusher units.
“GET falling off a bucket and getting into a crusher jaw can cause a lot of very expensive damage, not to mention posing a potentially lethal safety risk. But KVX users are finding they never have GET components coming loose and getting into a crusher, due to their unique metallurgy and bolted retention system.”
WHOLE OF LIFE COSTS
{{image3-a:r-w:200}}Guntner said while KVX products had a higher up-front cost, their significantly longer wear lives, excellent physical retention and reversible design generally resulted in lower whole-of-life costs.
He outlined the key advantages of KVX:
• There are no adapters to replace.
• No adapter welding or maintenance is required.
• There are no adapter noses to wear.
• There are no pins to fall out.
• There is a slimmer frontal profile for improved penetration.
• It features a harder, tougher bucket lip.
• It offers better protection for the underside of the lip and bucket, by combining teeth, adapters and bucket protection all in one component.
• Longer service intervals.
• More reliable GET retention (protection against GET loss, crusher damage and associated costs).
• Ability to reuse worn out remnants on site as welded wear protection.
A number of leading demolition/recycling and civil contractors across Australia have spoken about their experiences with KVX in these applications.
CASE STUDIES
Old Red Brick Co
This family-owned, South Australia-based demolition contractor has been in business for more than 30 years, specialising in housing and commercial demolition.
Its fleet of five 20- to 30-tonne excavators – including three Komatsu units – have KVX’s recently released 131222 HD Penetration teeth, designed for sub-30-tonne excavators, fitted to the sieve buckets on all five machines.
Maintenance manager David Burton, who provided design input and suggestions to KVX for the new tooth line, described it as “amazingly good”.
The sieve buckets fitted with the KVX Penetration teeth are used for ripping out concrete footings, then loading the material into tippers.
{{image4-a:r-w:200}}“We’ve found when we are scraping along concrete with teeth, these new design HD Penetration teeth are giving us a lot better wear than we previously had with the standard KVX teeth – like, amazingly good,” he said.
“With the new teeth, we can go about a year and two months, say around 2000 hours for a full set, including rotating them. They last even longer than the previous ‘paddle’ teeth, probably because they have more material in them.
“They can also get in under footings so much better, because they can dig in way more, and our operators love them.
“One very good thing with the new HD Penetration tooth design, which was actually one of our suggestions to Chris Guntner and Komatsu’s Ben Rowe, is the higher raised back where they bolt on. With the new HD Penetration teeth, we can use the same bolts over multiple changeovers. So far, we’ve done one changeover reusing the bolts, and I anticipate we can use them again on our next set of teeth as well.
“We think we had this issue because we do so much scraping along concrete surfaces, which is probably something unique to our kind of demolition operation.”
Burton says since switching to KVX teeth, he has not seen a single issue with a tooth snapping off.
“With our previous conventional teeth, we were snapping teeth sometimes within a month, and we were always breaking retainers,” he said. “Often, we’d snap off a tooth well before it was fully worn, and we’d just have to chuck it away.
“The way these KVX teeth are retained is so much better because nothing can rip them off.
“That’s the trouble with GET in demolition applications. If a tooth catches on rebar or bit or metal in the wrong place, it tends to snap off. That doesn’t happen with the KVX.
“For me, the biggest advantage of KVX teeth is you can just bolt them on and never have to worry about them for a year.
“These days, I never get a call from an operator telling me, ‘My teeth have just snapped off.’ ”
Divall’s Earthmoving & Bulk Haulage
Based in Goulburn, NSW, Divall’s carries out a wide range of crushing and quarrying operations, demolition and recycling, and civil contracting throughout the southern regions of the state.
{{image5-a:r-w:200}}KVX teeth are fitted to six of its Komatsu 20-tonne class excavators, as well as to a 35-tonne excavator of another make.
According to Malcolm Peake, Divall’s purchasing co-ordinator, the company switched to KVX 10 years ago after a conventional tooth broke off and went through a portable crusher.
“That resulted in a $20,000 repair to the crusher, because the magnet didn’t catch the broken tooth,” Peake said. “As a result, we looked around for alternatives, and opted for KVX. Even though they are more expensive, the KVX teeth just don’t come off, plus we get a lot more wear life from them.”
Divall’s workshop manager Tony Wright says the company is getting up to 4000 hours for a set of KVX teeth – including a rotation cycle – compared with only about 500 hours for conventional teeth.
With any KVX GET system, the customer also receives a KVX base lip, which Wright said worked well with the KVX teeth and provided long service life.
“KVX parts last a long time,” he said. “Yes, they’re a little more expensive to buy, but the whole of life costs are much lower, as you don’t have to change them as often. KVX saves downtime, which saves money.”
GP Sons Demolition
This family-owned contractor has carried out housing, commercial and internal demolition projects throughout the Adelaide region since being established more than a decade ago by Gavin Piller and his son Ben.
It operates about seven excavators from one to 30 tonnes, all fitted with KVX teeth on the sieve buckets used for its demolition works, with these teeth lasting at least 6000 hours.
“We’ve been using KVX now for around seven years, after we found we were always losing our conventional teeth, then having the buckets bending apart when we’d use the conventional lip,” Ben Piller said.
“The KVX system has a bigger and stronger lip on it, so it’s easier to pull the concrete up, and we’re not bending the bucket.
“We’re also getting much longer life from them, around 6000 hours per set, which is pretty good.
“We buy all our excavators new, keep them for about four years, then turn them over when they’ve passed their warranty period.
“We find the KVX teeth last that full four years without needing replacing. We just rotate the teeth at around 3000 hours, and by the time they are worn out, it’s time to trade the machine in.
“I saw the KVX teeth on a competitor’s machine, and thought we should give them a go.
“I met up with Ben Rowe from Komatsu’s Adelaide branch. He talked me through them, and every machine we’ve bought since then has had KVX.
“We are getting five to six times the life compared with conventional teeth systems.”
Source: Komatsu Australia