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TheLong HaulTen years after the birth of the 797,the world’s largest mining truckis still going strongStory by Caitlin Crawshaweoff Shantz has a photo of hisdaughter standing in front of thewheel of a Caterpillar 797 truck on“Bring your child to work day,” two years ago.Decked out in a hard hat and steel-toedrubber boots, the 14-year-old grins proudly ather dad. The top of her hard hat reaches barelya third of the way up the tire of the 797. Atmore than 20 feet high and 47 feet long, the797B boasts a maximum payload of 380 tons.To put it in perspective, if that payload werebull elephants, the 797 could hold about 70of them.Shantz, a senior reliability inspector atSyncrude’s Aurora mine in northern Alberta,explains that everything about the vehicle islarger than life. Even minor repairs on a truckare big operations, requiring huge equipmentand lots of teamwork.“It’s pretty much a minimum of two peopleand, like, a 20-ton crane. There’s nothingsmall in this truck…on every shift we’ve gotprobably 30, 40 technicians just to maintainour fleet. It’s a big piece of machinery.” Andthat’s a big understatement.Shantz has seen the 797 evolve since1999, when Syncrude began using its first Cat797 from Finning (it was purchased in 1998).At the time he was a field mechanic, who developeda hands-on knowledge of the truck.These days, he’s part of a committee comprisedof technical experts from Syncrude,Finning and Caterpillar. For the last few years,the group has worked to fine-tune the truck,improving its reliability. These days, the mostrecent incarnation, the 797B, runs at about84% availability. In other words, in a 24-hourwork day, this vehicle is on the road for morethan 20 hours.“As far as I know, between Finning, Syncrudeand Caterpillar, we’ve got the highestavailability on the 797 in the world rightnow,” says Shantz.While the truck itself is a marvel of engineering,the idea behind it is simple, explainsFinning’s Alex Colquhoun, who worked withthe truck for five years as a reliability specialistin Fort McMurray, Alberta. Because of thelarge volumes of material that must be transportedin the oil sands, it’s advantageous tohave a smaller fleet of bigger vehicles.“If they wanted to move the amount ofmaterial today with smaller trucks, they’d haveto double or triple the size of the fleet. They’dneed three times as many people and threetimes as many workdays needed to do anypreventive maintenance – and they’d needthree times as many tires,” says Colquhoun,now Finning’s mining equipment manager.Paul Kearney, Syncrude’s manager ofmining at Aurora, explains that the first797s were used at the company’s MildredLake mine, and then the Aurora site whenit opened in 2000. In addition to allowingthe company to take advantage of the economyof scale, the vehicle has proven itselfin northern Canada, he says. The truck canhandle all kinds of weather, such as frozenroads in winter and soft ground in spring,68 tracks & treads • Spring 2008 www.finning.ca