Bucket teeth of an excavator are among the main vulnerable components, comprising of tooth seats and tips combined. Their function is twofold; firstly protecting the bucket itself while acting as consumable parts to replace and extend its service life; furthermore mining operations become much simpler as they make mining much faster and simpler.
Bucket teeth can generally be divided into cast and forged groups based on manufacturing methods; their performances differ significantly; typically speaking, forging gives forged bucket teeth greater wear-resistance, harder surfaces and twice longer service lives than cast ones while costing only 1.5x as much.
Casting bucket teeth: Casting is the process of pouring liquid metal into an appropriate casting cavity to form parts or blanks before cooling and solidifying it to obtain them, such as casting bucket teeth. Castings tend to produce pores or sand holes due to poor mold design and their mechanical properties are significantly inferior compared with forgings in terms of their wear resistance, durability and service life.
Forging bucket teeth: Forging requires using forging machinery to apply pressure to special metal billets at high temperatures before extrusion at high pressures and refine the crystal material by plastic deformation causing plastic deformation and yielding desirable mechanical properties such as wear resistance. After forging metals can improve their organizational structure providing increased mechanical properties as well as extended service life of their finished forged bucket teeth products.
Of course, choosing bucket teeth depends heavily upon the working environment in which the excavator will use its bucket teeth; that will determine which types are suitable.