The recent introduction of Komatsu's largest haul truck, the 360-ton-capacity 960E-1 (see sidebar, p. 74), serves as a king-sized reminder of the vast amount of technology contained in almost any type of modern mine production equipment. From tires to transistors, today's, haulers feature components that are often much stronger, larger, smaller, or smarter than those of a decade ago, and the trucks themselves offer levels of reliability, performance, control, vehicle health monitoring and diagnostic capabilities that were for many years just designers' daydreams. However, once a haul truck is released into the wild-put to work in a production environment-its carefully coordinated components must cope with the challenges of daily operations, which can range from truck or loader operator error to changing weather, road surface and rock conditions and variable material density. Probably nothing on a hauler takes more overall punishment from these external factors than the truck's dump body. Consequently, manufacturers put a lot of engineering, not to mention a lot of metal, into their standard body configurations to enable them to provide a reasonable balance of payload rating and service life over a wide variety of possible applications. Most also offer optional configurations that can handle site-specific needs such as high-volume bodies for coal or ultra-lightweight designs for deep pits, and specialist body suppliers provide even more alternatives to standard styles.
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