Placer Dome – Don Smales –Changing wear materials – looking at pin less attachments and a Kevlar clothing for pin installation where needed. Echo Bay uses a pneumatic hammer / pin drivers. They note that this dramatically reduces metal debris related incidents. They just went through a mine wide audit. They have started a morning meeting with operations. This seems to be working well and they have been doing this about 6 months. They discuss safety issues, near misses, department coordination.

Placer Dome Bald Mtn. – Joe Zeman / Joe Sandoval – Mine will be slowing down drastically by September. The safety record at the mine is the best in their respective sites and they are proud of this accomplishment.

Barrick Goldstrike – Rich Fifield / Terry Taylor - Safety is a primary objective and the success Barrick is seeing is in large part due to the process of the employees driving the programs. They have implemented schedule changes to concentrate the majority of the truck maintenance staff and activity is done on dayshift. They still have a small amount of support equipment being maintained at night. They have designed their truck pm to take about 3 hours from 4 to 5 hours. This allows them to keep the shovel maintenance separated out from the truck maintenance. Trucks are maintained Monday through Thursday. They are essentially doing the same amount of production with half of the trucks that they had previously. The schedule is four ten hour shifts. They have seen a boost in moral due to the employees being home at night with their families. The maintenance crew comes on at 5:30 and one guy immediately heads for the shovel and get there while it is in operation. This insures that the shovel is shut down right at 6:00 for maintenance. They have an hourly technician working on the drill CI program. Every other PM the drill is taken to the shop and a complete wash is done and a more complete backlog period is done while in close proximity to the parts and other resources. Terry hope to see the results of this show up in a reduced MTBF.

Apollo Gold - Kelly Alexander – They have just been purchased by a group of 4 partners – Navaro Gold. They have gone 3 years without a lost time accident. The mine life is now approximately 13 years now. Exploration is ongoing and things are looking brighter at Apollo Gold. They have done some modifications to the CAT 994 to eliminate frame cracking. It looks like the modifications are working well.

Echo Bay McCoy Cove – Active mining and milling has stopped and they are in a reclamation mode. They have just installed a set of aftermarket rails. They have installed Trek rails and claim the warranty is about 50% better than OEM with a drastic price reduction from OEM. They have two truck remaining to complete the transmission tune up campaign. This was a best practice implemented after the presentation by Newmont at the last meeting. They drilled and shot both leach pads and deem it successful. They are not sure of the gold ounce increase, but it has increased.

Newmont West – Jon George / Larry Henman – Moving from hours based maintenance to condition based. Safety inspection program includes weekly safety inspections. It really helps on the housekeeping side of business. Twin is really slowing down compared to years past. Lone Tree however is ramping up and equipment is moving that direction. They are running 17 trucks at Twin Creeks with two Hitachi EX3500s and one CAT 994. They are looking at more opportunity in the transmission program. They are also looking at CAT 16G circle improvements. They are also looking at lubrication options. Barrick reports that Dow Corning makes a spray graphite and Barrick says that circle lubrication works, but the problem is getting the lubrication applied. Some NDT benefits come from the driveline inspections. NDT inspections are performed on parts used in the onsite rebuild shop. Have found cracking in the drive axles of the Cat trucks. Crack begins to show up longitudinally as early as six months. The cracks start out small but grow quickly until catastrophic failure.

Newmont East – Mitch Geyer – Working towards dayshift maintenance schedules using 12 hour rotational crews. Truck MTBF has doubled as a result of the maintenance and crew schedule change. The planning group has recently been restructured to work more consistently.

Newmont East – Don Trowbridge – have just moved from 4,000 employees worldwide to about 26,000. There has been a lot of personnel movements to other projects. The Gold Quarry layback project is a positive to the operation, adding mine life. Being challenged to push the haul trucks to 110,000 hours. How to make the frames live is an issue. The site uses CPI to guage bonus and performance. Don talked about the alliances that Newmont uses, citing the Dunphy Terminal as a good installation. The onsite rebuild shop is working very well. The highest hour engine running is at about 16,000 hours. Wheel groups are a major focus and involves a great deal of savings in the way of cash flow. The wheel group program went from about $14mm invoiced to about $7mm. Savings are at $2.1mm for two years. This instills a lot of pride. Year to date at Twin Creeks $600,000 in savings have been documented. Both Newmont Nevada onsite rebuild shops have received the Timken Bearing Certification. The Inconel exhaust bolt test at Carlin is still ongoing and the bolts are performing well.

Goodyear tested a transmitter that was installed in six tires to transmit real time data. The test was regarded as a failure due to hardware reliability and durability.

They have just received version 5 pads and they are running them on CAT D10N Rails. They are working with IPD to develop this product. They are having problems with rails and do not want to supply these rails at this time. The regrouser job was done by IPD in Salt Lake City. The operators really like the pads and claim it is much quieter, smoother with increased traction on side hills.