4 Ways Carbide Wear Proofing Can Enhance Your Productivity

In industrial applications, wear parts take the heaviest, steadiest abuse — either from abrasion and wear, repetitive high-impact force, routine contact with corrosive materials, or a combination of any of them. Whether you're manufacturing asphalt shingles, producing cement, or processing limestone, your machinery takes a beating and their wear parts bear the brunt. This is why wear parts, traditionally, don't last long.    
Depending on the machine and the application in which it is being used, most wear parts are made with stainless steel or high-chromium steel alloys, and sometimes utilize ceramic. Operators might measure wear life in months or weeks. Often enough, though, they’re counting down wear life in hours. Steel is strong, but for industrial wear parts, it isn’t nearly strong enough.    

Here’s where Tungsten Carbide wear proofing changes the equation.

By leveraging our expertise in wear solutions, we apply proprietary Tungsten Carbide technologies — including StarCarb, TigerCarb, FlexCarb, TuffCarb, and more — to critical industrial machinery components like auger flights, liner plates, wear skids, and many other applications. With precision engineering and a team of specialists tailoring solutions to your needs, hours and weeks of wear life can stretch to months or years. The productivity benefits are often just as transformative, helping operations achieve maximum uptime, optimized output, and improved profit margins — part by part, machine by machine.   Looking for more specifics? Here are just four of the ways Carbide wear proofing can benefit an industrial operation, both short term and long term.

Benefit 1: Extended Equipment Lifespan

The core purpose of Tungsten Carbide wear proofing: extending the lifespan of critical machinery components. It works, fundamentally, because Carbide is formulated for high hardness, extreme toughness, impact resistance, and corrosion resistance.

Carbide isn't metal and it isn't ceramic — it's a compound that combines and amplifies the strengths of both. In the four-part metallurgy process that produces Tungsten Carbide, tungsten and carbon maxes out abrasion resistance and a cobalt binder increases strength.

The result is a hard material that stays stronger for significantly longer, holding up against just about everything industrial applications can throw at wear parts.

Against Abrasion: Tungsten Carbide can outlast steel parts by a factor of 25 to 1 (and above) -— on the Mohs Hardness Scale, it's at 9, which is twice as hard as steel and just beneath diamond  
 
Against Corrosion: Tungsten Carbide stands up to acetone, ethanol, gasoline, ammonia, most bases, weak acids, and organic solvents.   

Against High Impact: Tungsten Carbide can be engineered to take a hit.   

Against High Heat: Tungsten Carbide performs reliably up to 1000°F. (Steel typically starts to weaken above 500-600°F.)  

The increased strength and durability translates to fewer part failures and more consistent, reliable uptime.   Our Tungsten Carbide wear parts last longer. They do a better job of protecting your machinery. And you pull the most value out of your major investments, both day-to-day on the production line and over the long term.

Benefit 2: Minimized Maintenance Downtime 

Because Carbide wear proofing extends the wear life of critical components, it reduces the frequency and duration of maintenance downtime — both planned and unplanned.   When wear parts are protected from accelerated wear, they require less servicing. They need less frequent replacement. You don’t need to put as much maintenance time on the schedule.   Here’s an example from a high-volume asphalt shingle manufacturer:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

With a single change to Tungsten Carbide, this operation eliminated more than 30 instances of planned maintenance downtime. Their operators spent less time shutting down production lines, disassembling equipment, and installing replacement parts. They were able to spend more time surpassing production goals.   

Carbide regularly cuts down the need for emergency repairs and unplanned maintenance interventions, too.   

Here's another concrete example, from a state Department of Transportation:   Their teams using ground-engaging skids would routinely deal with part failure due to asphalt, granite, gravel, sand, and dirt grinding down the steel surfaces. Skid replacements always slow down production, but more concerning: If wear was able to reach the pivot box, the DOT would be dealing with serious safety risks and costly rebuilds.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

The team installed Tungsten Carbide ground-engaging skids in May 2019, and they've been in continuous service (with no unplanned maintenance needs) since. That cut out the need for about 15 replacement skids and all the downtime required for changeouts.

Benefit 3: Increased Output and Efficiency

Operators recognize that wear life isn’t as “all or nothing” as it might seem from the outside. Before they need to be replaced, unprotected wear parts generally start to falter, steadily decreasing the quality of whatever’s being produced.

There’s a wear-life middle ground, where product quality and production efficiency start to suffer, even though repairs or replacement parts aren’t strictly “necessary” yet.

Tungsten Carbide wear protection removes that lesser-quality middle ground, largely because Carbide wears differently from steel — in that it barely wears. With Tungsten Carbide protection, parts stay at or near their peak, preserving and maintaining the performance and efficiency of the machine and keeping its output just as consistent.

This productivity benefit in action:

One customer using cast steel blades on multiple machines was replacing OEM parts every 750 hours. Well before blade failure, their cut quality suffered, leading to significant culls and waste. When they switched to Carbide-protected blades, they got more than 5,000 hours of performance, with consistent cut quality from hour one to 5,000.

Another important performance benefit: This kind of reliability means operators are freed to focus on optimizing output, rather than troubleshooting equipment issues.

Your team is able to aim for exceptional, rather than acceptable. 

Benefit 4: Cost Savings on Parts and Repairs

While the upfront investment in Tungsten Carbide-protected wear parts may be slightly higher than traditional wear parts, the long-term benefits — financial and otherwise — far outweigh the initial cost.

By extending the lifespan of critical components and reducing replacements and maintenance time, operations see direct and indirect cost savings.

Back to the state Department of Transportation that switched to Carbide skids:

By replacing OEM steel skids with Carbide-protected ones, they saw a total savings of $2077.40 per mower, over 5 years. Those savings will only keep compounding.

Beyond replacement parts inventory, operations see cost savings in a reduced need for maintenance interventions, i.e. lower labor costs.

Technicians spend less time disassembling, repairing, and reassembling equipment. They spend more time using (and making money with) it.

Customized Carbide Solutions

Wear life challenges are something every industrial operation manages. But every operation, every application, every company — and every challenge — has its own unique twists. We recognize (and experience) this, so we built Good Earth Tools on responding to unique challenges with unique solutions.

Our company specializes in fully customized Tungsten Carbide wear proofing solutions, tailored to each customer, each machine, and each unique need.

Our engineers use advanced 3D scanning to measure existing components and wear parts precisely, at each customer’s location. That allows us to minimize downtime and disruption on our customers’ production floor and ensure an exact fit for all replacement and retrofit parts.

Whether your work involves mining, material handling, mixing, crushing, mowing, manufacturing, or beyond, we can customize a Tungsten Carbide wear proofing solution for your equipment. Your operation can experience the productivity benefits of Tungsten Carbide first-hand. 

Bring Us Your Wear-Proofing Challenges

Curious about how Tungsten Carbide wear proofing can benefit your operation? Reach out and tell us about your wear-proofing challenges. We’ll walk you through options and opportunities and tell you more about how we approach custom Tungsten Carbide wear-proofing solutions.

Click below to contact us and set up a time to talk with the Good Earth Tools team.