Orapa is one of the world's largest diamond mines. It is owned by Debswana, a partnership between the De Beers Company and the government of Botswana. They have been one of Motion Metrics's early adopters of ToothMetricsTM technology.
The combined ToothMetricsTM + ViewMetricsTM system was fully installed and commissioned on February 2, 2005 on a Terex RH200 hydraulic shovel. The photos below show the final installation of the system.
On the next morning following the installation, the shovel lost the tip of a tooth. The following sequence of images (with time-stamp logged by the system software) shows the actual screen as seen by the operator during the event.
The ToothMetricsTM system detected the missing tooth within 1 ½ minutes (from 08:38:13 to 08:39:29), and triggered the audio alarm to alert the operator. The operator reported to dispatch to instruct the truck to dump the tooth into waste, successfully preventing the tooth from reaching the crusher.
The mine conducted a search for the broken tooth. Team of five excited personnel climbed through the suspected load with the goal of finding the tooth, and before noon they had located the evidence. The photos below show the tooth as it was found in the dumped load, confirming to the Orapa mine management that ToothMetricsTM is an effective measure for protecting the crusher against broken teeth and adapters. Their investment paid off immediately.
