Custom steel bushings for mining equipment: reliability gains for fleet engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell

First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Custom steel bushings engineered for excavators, loaders, rope shovels, dozers and drill rigs are being tailored to withstand high-load, abrasive and shock-intensive mining conditions. Supplier Sibo is focusing on precision machining and finishing of steel bushings to control clearances, surface hardness and lubrication behaviour, aiming to reduce wear in pivot points and boom joints. For maintenance and reliability teams, the move towards application-specific bushing geometry and metallurgy signals more scope to extend component life and lengthen shutdown intervals in heavy mobile fleets.
Technical Brief
- Machining sequences include rough turning, semi-finishing and final CNC finishing to maintain tight concentricity tolerances.
- Surface finishing incorporates controlled grinding and polishing to achieve consistent Ra values for hydrodynamic lubrication films.
- Heat treatment is applied to stabilise microstructure, enabling high surface hardness with a tougher core.
- Bushings are supplied with custom lubrication groove patterns and feed holes matched to OEM greasing systems.
- Dimensional control of internal diameters is tuned to specific pin fits, limiting ovality and misalignment under load.
- For fleets standardising on custom bushings, reliability teams can rationalise spares inventories across multiple machine classes.
Our Take
Within the 418 Product/Projects-tagged pieces in our database, relatively few focus on component-level items like steel bushings, which suggests Sibo is targeting a niche where incremental reliability gains can materially reduce unplanned downtime on Australian fleets.
For Australia-focused Mining coverage, most product items centre on digital systems or mobile equipment; a mechanical wear-part story like this signals operators may be revisiting basic consumables to squeeze extra life out of existing trucks and loaders rather than committing to large capex replacements.
Suppliers of custom components into the Australian market often use such offerings as a stepping stone to long-term maintenance or rebuild contracts, so Sibo’s bushings could be a route into broader lifecycle support deals with mine operators and contractors.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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