Genuine Cat® Parts: Dark or Milk Chocolate?

July 8, 2020

Buckets or blades, tips or edges, rippers or side cutters – no matter the size, ground engaging tools have a direct effect on a machine’s ability to produce. Cat® Ground Engaging Tools (GET) are designed to offer performance and value differentiation for our customers.

Here’s a look at a tool with chocolate candy twist!

THE CHOCKY BAR

In the industry, laminated wear products or LWP are commonly called “chocky bars.” The design of these parts makes them look strikingly similar to a chocolate bar. First used in Australia mining, the part name is an affectionate nod to our friends who call chocolate the same thing. 

Chocky bars come in many shapes and sizes including bars, rectangle tiles, trapezoidal blocks, round doughnuts, and even comet shapes. These shapes can be used to cover almost any surface exposed to high rates of wear. Once mounted on a mining shovel bucket, for example, the part protects against abrasion in harsh working conditions. Cat dealers are able to support our customer needs with this simple, cost effective parts solutions.

LWP consist of white iron steel castings that are copper brazed onto a mild steel backing plate. This makes them easy to weld to high wear areas of a machine, but also have a Rockwell C hardness of over 60 points. Some of these parts are designed to bend and weld in a radius (such as a bucket liner). 

CAT TOOLS FOR THE LIFE OF YOUR MACHINE

A broad range of GET options is available to precisely match a machine’s design specifications. Preventive maintenance (PM) gives our customer’s a planned and controlled program of systematic maintenance, testing, and analysis to help extend the life of their equipment and help minimize after-failure repairs that may cause unscheduled downtime.

Unfortunately, you can’t buy these unique chocky bars in any store, but genuine CAT chocky bars are available for all GET needs at a local CAT dealer. That’s even sweeter!

Sometimes engineering is thought to be conventional and highly technical. But every now and again, it’s just plain fun. One of Caterpillar’s engineers knows this quite well – meet Adam Dean, Life Cycle Manager on the GET (Ground Engaging Tools) commercial team. Through the years, Adam has helped design, develop, test and market Cat parts.

Always pursuing the best solutions for our customers, Adam loves designing genuine Cat® parts. You might even say he eats them up.  

One of his first Caterpillar engineering projects was to develop what’s technically known as “laminated wear products” or LWP, including the chocky bar. In a conversation with colleagues, a brilliant idea dawned: Why not make a Caterpillar chocolate chocky bar? And so, nearly 10 years after Caterpillar first released designs for its chocky bar parts, the process began to design and create the first food item to officially bear the Caterpillar® brand mark: a chocolate bar in the shape of Caterpillar’s chocky bar GET.