PC8000 Crawler Shoes

In the extreme conditions of the Canadian Oil Sands, excavators operate in a sticky and highly abrasive environment coupled with temperatures ranging from -45°C to +35°C. In these demanding conditions, the primary track wear occurs in the pins, pin bores and the roller paths.

A customer reached out to Bradken to attempt to reduce the amount of track wear that was occurring on its PC8000 excavator. Bradken has a number of PC8000 undercarriage fitments around the world. We are able to achieve superior wear performance due to our through hardened alloy steel, which outperforms induction hardened OEM steel over the life of the track. Bradken crawler shoes are fully compatible with other components in the undercarriage meaning that the life of the tracks are extended without sacrificing the life expectancy of the mating components. The results from Bradken’s monitoring of pins and pin lug wear rate on the PC8000 machines showed that our product outperformed the OEM offering.

The OEM crawler shoes achieved only 17,000 hours with 46 broken shoes during operation. Comparably the new Bradken crawler shoes achieved 23,000 hours with no broken shoes. This 35% improvement in shoe life provided direct benefits to the customer in cost reductions, machine uptime and safety.