The mining industry is normally operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in order to make an acceptable return on the high capital investment,  it is of utmost importance that haul trucks are always available when required. Repair and maintenance, daily checks of oil, water and tyres reduces the technical availability of haul truck fleets. The stops for safety reasons during slippery weather of the current large haul trucks have a considerable negative influence on the usage.

The fact that ETF trucks can operate under slippery conditions delivers an increase in utilization of around 8%. On top of this comes the savings due to hot-seat shift change. This means that the operators don’t have to carry out any checks during shift change. On average this saves 20 minutes per shift i.e. one hour per day. (4 %) In the downtime for maintenance it will pay off that ETF trucks don’t need compulsory oil changes!

ETF designed its trucks with the eyes of the mechanic who has to work on it. In practice this means that in each and every technical item the engineers have studied the way repair and maintenance needs to be carried out.

A general rule is that when a technical item needs repair or maintenance and this takes longer than 20 minutes, the item will be exchanged. Therefore the four engines are mounted on a separate roll-out frame to enable fast engine exchange. Complete swap out of an engine takes 15 minutes!

All axles are constructed for fast exchange, within 45 minutes a complete axle group is changed. A tyre change is done within 15 minutes!

ETF calls this the ‘Formula One Pit Stop’ approach.

ETF assumes that the total increase in usage will result in approx. 12 % increased productivity.

How much money does the 95 % technical availability covert into? Well calculations made by mine owners suggest a considerable amount of money.

ETF guarantees a technical availability of 95% including lost time for tyre changes!

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