Geographe’s plans for MINExpo and market expansion to the Americas

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A leading Australian manufacturer of heavy mining equipment parts, Geographe is known for its robust supply chain management and innovative parts and tooling solutions designed to meet the dynamic demands of the mining industry.

In a recent Q&A with Mine Australia, Geographe’s Andrew Lindsay, Senior Vice President of Sales & Business Development - Americas, discussed the company's strategic expansion into the Americas and their plans for the highly anticipated MINExpo 2024.

Geographe is an enhanced performance parts and tooling company that's been working with tier one mining companies for over 50 years in Australia. We want to expand our solutions into the Americas, so we are attending MINExpo this year as we bring the brand to the USA, Canada, Mexico, and Colombia. We have a bit of a branding push to do first, followed by visiting customers and educating them about what we do as a company, bringing them tooling and enhanced performance solutions to help them reduce safety risks, and downtime.

One challenge we have observed in the USA, is safety. For instance, a lot of the customers are trying to remove ball studs in unorthodox ways, which is where our Ball Stud Removal Tool, the BSRT, comes in. The BSRT is a nice lightweight handheld unit that is highly effective at removing those ball studs safely.

Another challenge is pricing and availability of heavy machinery replacement parts. Geographe has a really good line of enhanced performance solutions which take some of the OEM style parts and enhance them to have a longer life. In doing so, we're bringing a lot of these solutions to our customers at a lower cost. There's quite a significant price gap right now between our enhanced performance products that we bring to our customers and what the OEM retail pricing is. 

We do a lot of long-term planning to make sure that we will have stock available here in the Americas for when they need it based on a service plan or a service agreement in place with us. In addition, we have opened up manufacturing in Mexico, so now we can start to serve our customers from a very central location in the Americas.

One of the really interesting products that we developed is the Top Hat Bush. For example, the Hitachi EX3600 excavators, there's traditionally a lot of challenges with the standard thrust plate and bushes that are used on the bucket-to-stick, stick-to-boom, and boom-to-frame areas. We use a different material versus the OEMs, but we also integrate a lot of grease grooving for good grease dispersion across the pin, and the thrust plate is integrated into our bush, made from a much harder material. Our customers are seeing anywhere from two to three times the life for those products or specific area. In some cases, our customers are seeing another 4,000 hours extended life on their bucket use.

Another good example is ball studs on the CAT fleet, especially in Canada during spring time when the ground starts to thaw – the potholes and rutting can be detrimental to the ball studs. Customers that replace the OEM ball studs with Geographe ball studs are getting a much higher grade material, much better lubrication on the studs themselves, better stress relieving, and also a higher grade hardening process.

We have our kit solutions. If they're buying a ball stud from the OEM, you’re likely to need the nut, the seals, the caps, the retaining rings; with Geographe, you can order one part number from us and you'll get the entire kit, which makes it easier for procurement. 

Pins and bushes whether in the suspension, hoist cylinders of the trucks, or in the pivot positions on the tray often get seized, over time. Customers have to thermal lance them, which is a very high-risk process that's also very noisy and time consuming. It can sometimes take days to get these pins out, so we developed our pin assemblies allow our customers to remove pins easily. They'll bring the truck back to its standard OEM pin requirement sizes, and then they'll implement our colleted or greased pin assemblies.

Every mine that owns a CAT 785, 789, or 793 haul truck can relate to the difficulty they have removing ball studs, so we're going to be showcasing our Ball Stud Removal Tool. This will be one of the tooling on display, as well as an overview of some of the niche products that Geographe focuses on and has done well over the last 50 years, including various ball studs, some enhanced bushes as well as some colleted pin assemblies.

Our Mexican facility is already manufacturing, so we are already able to deliver the products our customers require. We've also opened up warehousing in Edmonton, Western Canada, for specific customers up in the Oil Sands, Coal, and Copper regions. As we grow further into Colombia, a lot of their products are consolidated in Miami, so we are considering warehousing in the Miami region.

In terms of support in the field, I'm based in Toronto myself - very central to Canada and the US, and it’s easy to get to Colombia and Mexico. We have staff already in Mexico representing Geographe, later this year, we'll have a team representing Geographe in Colombia and Western Canada.

The Geographe team will be joining Andrew Lindsay at this year’s MINExpo convention at stand S02 and will be available to discuss how Geographe can address your mine site challenges. 

Book a chat with Andrew here.