When you need a tough stud

Garry Liddell from Tranzweld drops onto the Q&M office desk a handful of magnetic business cards promoting Tuffstudds with a cartoon of a pumped up construction worker operating a stud welding gun.

“Stick them on the fridge,” he says. “Better still, in the women’s toilet – they love them.”

So do quarry operators despairing over wear of loader, excavator and dragline buckets, and dozer blades, crushers, chutes, and even dumptruck trays.

The chromium carbide laden wear resistant alloy studs are arc welded onto wear surfaces to greatly increase their service life.

“There are other wear protection systems around,” concedes Liddell, “but the North American Tuffstudds are cast from chromium steel and have the added advantage that fine material can ‘dead-bed’ in between the studs for extra wear protection.”

The studs are welded on earth moving equipment, etc, at the work site, using a mobile workshop on the back of a semi-unit trailer.

He shows us a series of surfaces that have been studded, including a loader bucket at Ihumatao Quarry near Mangere in Auckland that gets a hard time working scoria and had already done almost 16,000 hours after protected with Tuffstudds.

“Scoria is exceptionally abrasive, wearing away the front structural edge of the bucket, which would otherwise have to be cut out and replaced. 

“In the past, the quarry used another welding system using a stick electrode that was put on manually. The thicker Tuffstudds provide a better wear life and has the advantage that the fine material can ‘dead-bed’ in between the studs.”

In another example the wear protection studs have been applied to the tray rear deck plate of a dump-truck getting a lot of use in a Hastings alluvial quarry.

“The truck tray had been manufactured from 16mm plate and through shifting gravel and river rock all day the virgin plate had worn down to 8mm in places. And it was a leased machine with the lease company responsible for the wear.

“We did the welding over a weekend. Initially the owner, Fleet Partners, was concerned with the cost, but then area manager Kevin Johanson rang me not long after and said, ‘Garry – if you ever need a reference, just get them to ring me’.”

Liddell started his mobile repair welding and wear protection business in the Wellington region exactly two decades ago and started importing Tuffstudds from Canada in 1997 after an associate saw them on American equipment used in Papua New Guinea.

“He didn’t do anything with them so I decided to take on the distributorship of Tuffstudds on my own doing everything from the installation to the marketing.”

The business had to be mobile and the installation done on site. Recently Liddell bought a Freightliner semi unit and built a container workshop on the back with a 150KW generator, an 1850 amp, dual-gun, stud welder, and a 400 amp multi process welder. Business focussed on the North Island until 2000 when Liddell took his mobile service nationwide.

In addition to the wear protection stud system, Liddell also supplies Avdel bolts (hydraulic swadged bolts) that substitute traditional nuts and bolts that are prone to coming loose on vibrating quarry equipment.

“They are collars are placed on the bolt shaft with pulled up tight with a gun. And they won’t come undone. They use groves not threads, and are perfect for screening and crushing machinery where nuts and bolts tend to come loose through vibration.”

 Another product for quarries and mining equipment is his Tufftung. This is a weld-on wear protection application for cutting edges and bucket teeth that, in conjunction with Carbines Engineering, Liddell automated the welding process. A robot is used to apply the tungsten carbide grit on to the weld’s molten pool, improving wear life of the cutting edges and the teeth sharp.