Best practices: Wear parts
Morbark debuted a few new inserts at Demo Days. The company added Alpha 1, Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 inserts to its Alpha lineup.
“They range from good to better to best,” says John Cole, Morbark’s wear parts sales lead. “The best is Alpha 3. We’re trying to capture all of the market potential by offering three versions of the Alpha to customers to serve the customer who is buying based on price; the customer who is buying for price and quality; and the customer who wants the best insert regardless of price.”
PP&E followed up with Cole and David Daymon Jr., Morbark’s dealer development manager, after Demo Days to gain insight on best practices related to selecting and using wear parts.
PP&E: When investing in new wear parts, what should equipment owners keep in mind to make sure they get quality parts?
Daymon: Many times we find that customers will buy 90 percent of their wear parts from us and their other parts from someone else. If you have competitor wear parts in one machine, it will cause a ripple effect. Say the competitor insert to ours wears faster than your inserts, it can cause items like grates, hammers and anvils to wear out quicker. So make sure you have quality parts across the board not just based on price.
PP&E: How long should wear parts last on average?
Cole: It’s all relative to the amount of contamination the customer experiences. One customer will run the dirtiest C&D material through, and he won’t get near the life out of one insert compared to a person doing bark off a sawmill slab.
Daymon: We’ve had customers who have had inserts that last a couple hundred hours. Yet for C&D customers, they might only last 40 hours.
PP&E: What advice would you give to C&D customers to extend wear part life?
Cole: They need to pay attention to what they put through their machines. You hear of people sometimes dropping engine blocks in there, which causes catastrophic failure.
PP&E: What are some problems users often experience with wear parts?
Daymon: If wear parts aren’t well maintained, the fuel consumption on the machine goes way up. If your wear parts start to wear out quicker, your engine or machine has to make up that loss somewhere. When that happens, auto-reverse kicks in more often and your machine eats fuel at a higher rate than if you had longer-lasting wear parts.
PP&E: Could you share some best maintenance practices regarding wear parts?
Cole: Whenever changing inserts, always replace the bolts and nuts. Always use a torque wrench to tighten the bolts and nuts to the appropriate specification.
Daymon: Users should inspect their wear parts daily. Open up the equipment and look at not only how much wear takes place with the hammermill or rotor area, but also the anvils and grates. You don’t want to have an insert wear down to the point where it wears the hammer, as that could increase the replacement cost from only $300 to $500 to replace a set of inserts to $3,000 or more to replace both the insert and hammer.