I had a demonstration recently with a Portable Star Screen.
The customer asked to see the largest size available and because I did not have
one close by, I used a smaller unit for the demonstration. This was fine for
showing product features and benefits. Production capabilities were obviously
lower than the requested larger unit, but it was easy to see that a larger unit
would be able to produce more. While running our demonstration, it became clear
that with the support equipment used in the operation, the smaller unit was
more than capable of handling the daily production needs:
·
The wheel loader bucket was not large enough to
keep the hopper full.
·
Travel time between piles was too great
·
Finished Stockpile area was limited.
This happens quite a bit in other
equipment like grinders. A 1000hp grinder needs a machine to feed material into
it, another to push material to it and usually another to move material away
from it. Without these pieces of support equipment, the grinder runs empty and
sits idle along with the machine used to feed material into it and your
operator. A 1000hp grinder obviously does more production than a 750hp grinder
but it also uses about 30-40% more fuel per hour.
Take the time to look over your
operations:
·
Are you maximizing each machines usage?
·
Is your site layout slowing production?
·
Can you use a larger bucket to load equipment or
trucks?
The best way to evaluate your
grinder or screen is to simply divide the number of machine hours by volume
sold or produced. You can do this on a daily, weekly or any other time basis.
If the production rate per hour is less than 80% of maximum production per
hour, it is obvious that other issues and responsibilities are reducing
production, such as loading trucks or travel time. You could assume a loss of
20% is due to start up, warm up and cool down time. Any overage from that,
there is an issue.
Before buying your next piece of
production equipment, evaluate your support equipment and determine the
capabilities of production first. You may find that you need another piece of
support equipment along with the unit you were planning to purchase. That also
means another operator too.
Questions? Dave Whitelaw Grinderguy@askthegrinderguy.com
