Having ten new Bell B40E Articulated Dump Trucks (ADTs) doing the same production as twelve older ADTs at a coal mining contract may seem like a dream but this is exactly what a Gauteng-based contract miner has found.

Andru Mining, distinguished in the South African mining industry by its blue mining equipment, has been around since the late 1970s when it was founded by civil engineer, Terry Troughton. Day-to-day operational control has since been passed onto a new management team consisting of Joe Naicker, the Plant Director, Anthony Wardlaw, the Operations Director, Shonel Reddy the Financial Director and Branden Bowen who is the Commercial and Human Resources Director.

The company works exclusively in opencast mining contracts, servicing clients in the coal, gold, chrome, silica and fluorspar industries. Since acquiring its first Bell B20B ADTs in 1996, Andru Mining has owned many Bell machines and has steadily grown its fleet through the 20, 30 and 40-ton ranges.

“We were pleased to place an order for six Bell B30E and 34 Bell B40E ADTs with Bell Equipment Sales Representative, Vernon Johnstone in 2018,” says Joe Naicker. “Vernon has been servicing Andru Mining for many years and we had no hesitation in tasking him with our order.”

Of the 34 B40E ADTs, 10 were fitted with the newly designed Bell coal bin, which allows the truck to easily fulfil its design capacity of carrying between 36 to 39 tonnes of raw coal.

“As a proudly South African company supporting local content we experienced a sincere personal touch when seeing our newly-painted blue Bell ADTs being assembled in the Bell Equipment factory in Richards Bay, where their assembly was topped off by the ‘Built with Pride in Africa’ decal,” says Shonel Reddy. “We greatly appreciate that Bell Equipment values us as clients by painting our trucks blue at their factory and it makes us proud to be associated with the Bell brand.”

Delivery of the new fleet of Bell B30E and B40E ADTs took place during April, May, June and July 2018 and most trucks were delivered straight to their respective mining sites from the Bell Equipment Richards Bay factory.

“We at Andru Mining have a long relationship with Bell Equipment and taking the decision to now invest in the company’s E-series ADT was a relatively easy one,” Joe Naicker adds. “It’s a cost-effective machine to run and maintain compared to what is in the market and we’ve deployed the bulk of the 34 new Bell B40E ADTs to our coal mining sites between Middelburg and Belfast.”

Andru Mining’s new Bell B30E and B40E ADTs have been bought with the standard 12-month warranty with unlimited hours - a fact which the company feels works in its favour as utilisation on especially coal mines is high. Coal production demands high mechanical availabilities and the Bell B40E ADTs run on average for 20 hours in a 24-hour cycle.

“We’re enjoying the Bell Fleetm@tic® monitoring system,” Joe continues. “This adds value to the open dialogue we have with Bell Equipment’s Customer Support Representatives like Willem Johnson, who helps us in quickly sorting out technical hiccups that do crop up at times.”

Joe is adamant that even when their new Bell E-series ADTs have exceeded their warranties, Bell Equipment would still be asked to undertake all 1 000-hour services to ensure each machine has a clean bill of health to ensure maximum uptime.

The proof of the pudding, however, lies in the production figures of the new Bell B40E ADTs and for more on this we turned to Operations Director, Anthony Wardlaw, for his views on the performance of the new Bell B40E ADTs at one particular coal mine. “We used to run 12 Bell B40D ADTs on this same coal pit but with the new Bell B40E ADTs with coal bins we’ve been able to reduce that number to 10 trucks and we still achieve the same production. We don’t need any more justification that our choice of the Bell B40E ADT was the correct one.”

(Back left): Branden Bowen (Andru Mining Commercial & HR Director), Vernon Johnstone (Bell Equipment Sales Representative); (front left): Joe Naicker (Andru Mining Plant Director), Shonel Reddy (Andru Mining Financial Director) and Anthony Wardlaw (Andru Mining Operations Director).