Sudbury supplier celebrates sales to Peru and Brazil
Three representatives of B&D Manufacturing’s Peruvian distributor, International Wheel, spent a week in Sudbury this summer getting up to speed on the assembly and commissioning of the company’s Super Jack and assorted tooling for haul trucks used in surface mining operations.
Three pieces of B&D equipment were recently sold by Lima-based International Wheel to two customers: Compania Antamina SA, which operates a polymetallic open pit mining complex 200 kilometres south of Huarez, and to Komatsu Peru.
The Super Jack is designed to safely lift a 400-tonne haul truck. The B&D Tire Handler is designed for changing tires18 feet in diameter and weighing 10 tonnes, while the Multi-Handler increases safety and turnaround time on wheel motor repairs.
All three machines are designed for in-shop use.
Jacking up a 400-tonne haul truck to change a tire or repair a wheel motor can be both dangerous and time consuming without B&D’s tooling.
Maintenance personnel would lift the trucks with jacks and try to remove the tires using a lot of pressure, which “shook the hell out of the trucks” and placed the workers at risk, said B&D general manager Andre Ruest.
A fourth piece of equipment, a swing shaft changer, is designed to replace and service swing shafts on P&H shovels.
Without the B&D swing shaft changer, maintenance staff would have to dig a pit underneath the shovel to create sufficient clearance for a forklift to get under it.
B&D has sold approximately 50 pieces of haul truck tooling to end users across Canada, the Western United States, Mexico, South America and South Africa. A number of B&D Super Jacks and associated equipment are at work in the Alberta oil sands industry and a sale was recently made to Detour Gold in Northern Ontario.
In South America, which has been targeted as a priority market, B&D has a business development manager in Santiago, Chile, and several distributorships either established or in the works in other countries. A win in Brazil hasalso been achieved with the recent sale of four pieces of equipment to Vale.
“In addition to our distributor, International Wheel, we have a draft agreement with a distributor in Brazil and we’re in discussions with a potential distributor in Colombia,” said B&D global mining manager Wayne Desormeau. The company has also hired an export development manager, Fernando Pena, a Mexican, to handle all of the logistics related to customs and shipping and to provide advice on marketing strategy.
“So South America is pretty well taken care of in terms of having people in place,” said Desormeau. “Now, we need to go out and develop the business because it’s a big market with a tremendous amount of possibilities.”
Translation of company literature into Spanish and Portuguese is in the process of being completed. “We knew we needed to have our brochures in Spanish and Portuguese, but we didn’t know that all of our manuals had to be translated, and some of them are pretty heavy duty,” said Desormeau. “There was also an issue with radio remote control products, which we source from another supplier, because they wanted manuals for those products translated, too. Then there were the warning labels on the machines.”
The next market B&D has its eye on is Australia, which it scoped out August 20 to 23 by exhibiting at AIMEX, the largest mining show in the Asia-Pacific region.
B&D operates out of a modern facility in Chelmsford, just north of Sudbury, and employs 150 people.
