From the workshop floor

Undercarriage: the R900 000 decision most fleets get wrong

On a 37-tonne dozer, a full undercarriage replacement is close to a million rand. Most operations manage that spend on a calendar or a feeling, and end up either scrapping components with 30% life left or running chains to destruction and damaging sprockets and rollers with them.

The fix is not complicated: measure at 250-hour intervals, record percentage wear per component, and plot the trend. Once you have three data points you can forecast the replacement month within a fortnight, which lets you budget it, order it and fit it during a planned shutdown instead of an unplanned one.

Three habits change the number more than anything else: reduce reverse travel, avoid unnecessary high-speed tramming, and keep track tension correct for the material. Over-tensioned tracks in abrasive ground can halve chain life on their own.

New Gqeberha branch opens for Eastern Cape customers

Our eighth location opened in Gqeberha this month with a full parts counter, two workshop bays and three field service units. It completes coverage of every major economic region in the country.

Eastern Cape customers were previously supported out of Durban and East London, which meant a six to eight hour response on a breakdown in the Kouga or Sundays River areas. That drops to under three hours for most of the province.

The branch carries fast-moving parts for the full range plus automotive-grade consumables, and it will run operator training on demand from the first quarter.

Idle time is the cheapest saving on your site

Across the machines we monitor with ShanCare telematics, idle time averages 27% of engine hours. On a fleet burning 22 litres an hour, that is a substantial diesel bill for producing nothing, plus warranty hours, service intervals and resale hours consumed at a standstill.

Auto-idle and auto-shutdown settings help, but the real movement comes from showing operators their own numbers weekly. Sites that publish an idle-time leaderboard typically drop 8-10 percentage points inside two months, with no capital spend at all.

120 operators certified in our first academy year

The Jet Park training academy completed its first full year with 120 operators certified across dozer, excavator, loader, grader, roller and forklift disciplines, 38 of them through our enterprise development programme at no cost to the learner.

The measurable outcome customers care about: sites that put their full crew through certification recorded an average 11% reduction in fuel per productive hour and a marked drop in avoidable damage claims.