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In-house assembly of Bucyrus RH90C excavator under real field conditions

Posted on 12 Oct 2010

As part of the continuous improvement program, Dortmund based Bucyrus HEX carried out a special project during early July 2010, namely: to fully assemble a RH90C hydraulic excavator (in backhoe configuration) under real field conditions, but in-house.

The RH90C, weighing 175 t, is one of the smaller Bucyrus hydraulic excavators and is usually not fully assembled at the HEX factory, but shipped to the customer direct in modules, for final assembly on site. There were two major objectives for this project: staff training and continuous improvement of the manufacturing and assembly process.

By conducting such a project the training benefit was one central element. The assembly crew consisted of nine team members; four came from Bucyrus US, one from the Bucyrus HEX dealer Mantrac/Ghana and four team members from the Dortmund facility. Such a large assembly crew is usually not required in a real mining environment, but was exclusively put together for training purposes.

The mixture of different crew members turned out to be very successful as those crew members which had never worked on a hydraulic excavator before could learn and benefit from their colleagues’ vast experience.

On the other side their feedback was also valuable for Bucyrus since the manufacturing process was analysed as well during the project. All these findings shall be incorporated into the RH90C and soon into the whole Bucyrus hydraulic excavator model range.

This project was done for the very first time in order to move forward in Bucyrus becoming the preferred hydraulic excavator supplier. Right after the project this RH90C was disassembled and shipped to Ghana Manganese.

In order to conduct this improvement program, a particular area within the company premises was isolated from the general every day business. Final testing and commissioning were also included in this project. All excavator components such as crawler frames, carbody, superstructure frame and engine module were placed around the main assembly area piece by piece, similar to the modus operandi at a real mine site. Of course this also included safety requirements; the whole team got a complete safety briefing first and was wearing personal protection equipment all the time. Access to this area was given only by the assembly team after approval.

Finally, the assembly crew really did a great job during an exceptionally hot German July week, with temperatures close to 40°C.