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ty for easy installation and removal.Steel can be formulated to be hard and abrasion resistant or soft and tough. A hard steel won’t wear out as quickly, but a hard, quick hit may cause it to crack. Soft steel wears faster but can take shocks without breaking or developing cracks. To cover a wide variety of applications and soil conditions, most manufacturers strike a balance between the two properties. But the best way to know if you’ve got the right type of steel in your teeth is to observe how they perform over time.For particularly tough, abrasive applications some manufacturers weld carbide strips onto the tooth in highfriction areas. These are expensive, and usually make sense only for the large quarries and mines. “Those are really for applications where the customer can’t afford the downtime,” Simmons says.But what manufacturers don’t remend is hardfacing the teeth yourself. “It will void the warranty if you hardface, and the tooth will probably break,” Yoresen says. The reason is that manufacturers put the carbide wear strips on before the tooth goes through its final heat treating process. The heat generated by welding a finished tooth will ruin the temper of the steel and cause that area to be subject to breakage.And keep in mind that teeth get hot – too hot to touch during some operations, especially the teeth on bigger loaders or excavators working in abrasive materials. This can degrade the temper of cheaper steel, so in choosing a tooth design it can’t hurt to find out its temperature rating. Tooth breakage is another consideration. “When we talk to our end users their number one concern is tooth breakage,” says Nil Vallve, marketing and operations manager for MTG. And a loose fit between the tooth and the adapter can quickly lead to breakage or damage. “When all the parts are new everything fits tight, but the key to a good tooth system is one that stays tight over time,” he says. To do this the design has to avoid concentrated areas of stress and spread out the impact forces and mating surfaces to as wide an area as possible.And a broken tooth can sometimes be more than just a problem for that machine. “The costs of a lost tooth can snowball, especially if you’re working around any kind of crusher,” Yoresen says. “If you have a big chunk of hard steel like a tooth fall into a $200,000 crusher you’re going to damage the motor or other major ponent.”LITERATURE CITED1. A .N .Zelenin, Principles of Mechanical Breaking of Ground [in Russian], Mashinostroenie ,Moscow (1968).2. K .A .Artem39。ev ,Principles of the Theory of Scraper Excavation [in Russian], Mashgiz ,Moscow (1963). 12