Schlam Products’ Hercules trays and buckets: whole‑of‑life design notes for mine engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Schlam is redesigning its Hercules dump truck bodies and Barracuda excavator buckets as whole-of-life assets, using on-site 3D scanning of tray wear and deformation to drive iterative geometry changes from first load to end-of-life. Technical service representatives capture high-density surface data on operating fleets, feeding back into liner layouts, wear package selection and structural reinforcement strategies tailored to specific ore abrasivity and loading patterns. For mine operators, this enables data-based decisions on tray rebuild timing, payload optimisation and maintenance scheduling rather than relying on generic wear assumptions.
Technical Brief
- Schlam’s approach shifts product support from parts supply to ongoing asset performance engineering for mobile fleets.
Our Take
Schlam’s Hercules mining truck bed and Barracuda Bucket sit alongside the company’s recent move into green-steel truck bodies, as seen in the Xeroline and ‘world’s first’ green-steel trays, signalling that payload products are becoming a key lever for decarbonisation at Australian open‑pit sites.
The 300th Hercules tray delivery to Fortescue in Western Australia, noted in our coverage, shows that these truck beds are already deployed at large iron ore fleets, so any design tweaks or new variants discussed here are likely to be rapidly scalable across Tier 1 operators.
Schlam’s new Hunter Valley facility for Hercules bodies indicates that these products are now being positioned as a national standard solution for both coal and hard‑rock operations in Australia, which could influence OEM–aftermarket dynamics around truck body selection and maintenance contracts.
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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