Over the past few years, KVX's line of GET has become a de facto standard for demolition and recycling applications, through significantly longer life and most importantly excellent physical retention that eliminates tooth loss when loading crushers.
KVX is now widely used on excavators in the demolition/recycling sector in South Australia, and has been used successfully for a number of years by Divall's Earthmoving and Bulk Haulage in NSW for excavators feeding crushers with material for recycling, as well as virgin quarry materials. It has also recently been commissioned by Victorian-based contractor Delta Group for its demolition/recycling operations with positive results.
Chris Guntner, KVX Regional Sales Manager for Oceania, said feedback from customers indicated they appreciate the longer life, reduced downtime and excellent physical retention of KVX's adapter-less weld-free configuration.
He said KVX GET is unique in that, unlike other GET products on the market, all elements are forged or rolled rather than cast, and are bolt-on rather than being welded.
"This ensures significantly greater toughness, strength and abrasion resistance, for much longer wear life, and vastly improved tooth retention reliability; it is virtually unheard of for a KVX tooth to fall off a bucket into a crusher.
"This makes the product ideal for recycling and demolition applications, which often involve harsh and abrasive products being fed directly into crusher units.
"GET falling off a bucket and getting into a crusher jaw can cause a lot of very expensive damage, not to mention posing a potentially lethal safety risk," he said.
"But KVX users are finding they never have GET components coming loose and getting into a crusher, due to its unique metallurgy and bolted retention system."
Guntner said that while KVX products had a higher up-front cost, their significantly longer wear lives, excellent physical retention and reversible design generally resulted in lower whole-of-life costs.
He summarised the key advantages of KVX as being:No adapters to replaceNo adapter welding or maintenanceNo adapter noses to wearNo pins to fall outSlimmer frontal profile for improved penetrationHarder tougher bucket lipBetter protection for the underside of the lip and bucket, by combining teeth, adapters and bucket protection all in one componentLonger service intervalsMore reliable GET retention (protection against GET loss, crusher damage and associated costs)Ability to re-use worn out remnants on site as welded wear protection.
A number of leading demolition/recycling and civil contractors around Australia have gone on the record regarding their experiences with KVX in these applications.
Old Red Brick Co: This family-owned South Australian-based demolition contractor has been in business for over 30 years, specialising in housing and commercial demolition.
Its fleet of five 20-30 tonne excavators including three Komatsu units have KVX's recently released 131222 HD Penetration teeth, designed for sub-30 tonne excavators, fitted to the sieve buckets on all five machines.
Maintenance manager David Burton, who provided design input and suggestions to KVX for the new tooth line, described it as "amazingly good".
The sieve buckets fitted with KVX HD Penetration teeth are used for ripping out concrete footings, then loading the material out into tippers.
"We've found when we are scraping along concrete with teeth, these new design HD Penetration teeth are giving us a lot better wear even than we previously got with the standard KVX teeth like amazingly good," he said.
"With the new teeth, we can go about a year and two months, say around 4000 hours for a full set, including rotating them; they last even longer than the previous 'paddle' teeth, probably because they have more material in them.
"They can also get in under footings so much better, because they can dig in way more, and our operators love them.
"One very good thing with the new HD Penetration tooth design, which was actually one of our suggestions to Chris Guntner and Komatsu's Ben Rowe, is the higher raised back where they bolt on," said Burton.
"With the new HD Penetration teeth, we can use same bolts over multiple changeovers. So far, we've done one change over reusing the bolts, and I anticipate we can use them again on our next set of teeth as well.
"We think we had this issue because we do so much scraping along concrete surfaces, which is probably something unique to our kind of demolition operation."
Burton said since switching to KVX teeth, three years ago, he hasn't seen a single issue of a tooth snapping off.
"With our previous conventional teeth, we were snapping teeth sometimes within a month, and we were always breaking retainers. Often we'd snap off a tooth well before it was fully worn, and we'd just have to chuck it away.
"The way these KVX teeth are retained is so much better because nothing can rip them off," he said.
"That's the trouble with GET in demolition applications: if a tooth catches on rebar or bit or metal in wrong place, it tends to snap off. That doesn't happen with KVX.
"For me, the biggest advantage of KVX teeth is you can just bolt them on and never have to worry about them for a year.
"These days, I never get a call from an operator telling me 'my teeth have just snapped off'," Burton said.
Divall's Earthmoving & Bulk Haulage: Based in Goulburn, NSW, this company carries out a wide range of crushing and quarrying operations, as well as demolition and recycling, and civil contracting, throughout southern regions of the state.
KVX teeth are fitted to six of its Komatsu 20 tonne class excavators, as well as to a 35 tonner of another make.
According to Malcolm Peake, Divall's purchasing co-ordinator, the company switched to KVX about 10 years ago after a conventional tooth broke off and went through a portable crusher.
"That resulted in a $20,000 repair to the crusher because the magnet didn't catch the broken tooth," he said.
"As a result, we looked around for alternatives, and opted for KVX.
"Even though they are more expensive, the KVX teeth just don't come off, plus we get a lot more wear life from them."
According to Divall's workshop manager Tony Wright, the company is getting up to 4000 hours for a set of KVX teeth including a rotation cycle compared with only around 500 hours for conventional teeth.
With any KVX GET system the customer also receives a KVX base lip, which Wright said worked well with the KVX teeth and provided long service life.
"KVX parts last a long time. Yes, they're a little more expensive to buy, but the whole-life costs are much lower as you don't have to change them as often.
"KVX saves downtime, which saves money," he said.
GP Sons Demolition: This family-owned contractor has carried out housing, commercial and internal demolition projects throughout the Adelaide region since it was started over 10 years ago by Gavin Piller and his son Ben.
It operates around seven excavators from one to 30 tonnes, all fitted with KVX teeth on the sieve buckets used for its demolition works, with these teeth lasting at least 6000 hours.
"We've been using KVX now for around seven years, after we found we were always losing our conventional teeth, then having the buckets bending apart when we'd use the conventional lip," said Ben Piller.
"The KVX system has a bigger and stronger lip on it, so it's easier to pull the concrete up, and we're not bending the bucket.
"We're also getting much longer life from them; around 6000 hours per set, which is pretty good, I've got no complaints really," he said.
"We buy all our excavators new, keep them for about four years, then turn them over when they've passed their warranty period.
"We find the KVX teeth last that full four years without needing replacing; we just rotate the teeth at around 3000 hours, and by the time they are worn out, it's time to trade the machine in.
"I saw the KVX teeth on a competitor's machine, and thought we should give them a go. I met up with Ben Rowe from Komatsu's Adelaide branch, he talked me through them and every machine we've bought since then has had KVX.
"We are getting five to six times the life compared with conventional teeth systems," said Piller.
Dviall's Hybrid uses KVX in the demolition/recycling segment.