If your plant runs a Metso C106 jaw crusher, here's the short version of what 131 breakdown callouts have taught me: the jaw crusher is rarely the real reason you're down. The real reason is usually further along the circuit, in a cone crusher that's running without proper automation. So my advice has changed. Before you order another set of jaw plates, have a serious conversation about Metso IC70C cone crusher automation.
I don't sell automation, and I don't get a commission from Metso. I coordinate urgent repair logistics for crushing operations. Since the start of 2019, I have helped coordinate roughly 131 emergency callouts, and something like 45 of them involved a Metso C106 jaw crusher—either as the machine that actually failed or as the innocent bystander that paid for someone else's problem. In my experience, the second group has been bigger than the first.
It took me about four years and more middle-of-the-night phone calls than I can count to get to this view. Early on, I treated every emergency as a parts problem. Broken jaw die? Replace it. Cracked toggle plate? Replace it. I would fix the broken part, hand over the invoice, and drive home. Then the same site would call me back eight weeks later with the same name on the work order.
The C106 isn't an exotic machine. It's a single-toggle jaw crusher with a 1,060 x 700 mm feed opening—42 by 28 inches—and a reputation for being a straightforward, heavy, boring workhorse. I mean that as a compliment. It crushes what you put in front of it, and it doesn't surprise you very often. That's unusual in this industry.
So when an emergency call about a C106 comes in, I've learned to ask what happened in the rest of the plant before I blame the jaw. The pattern in my records is consistent: the jaw was feeding normally, then the secondary cone tripped, the conveyor behind the jaw stopped, and the jaw kept sending rock into a chute that had nowhere to send it. Someone let it pack up, or tried to clear it under load, and the C106 took the punishment. The broken wear parts and toggle are not the beginning of the story. They're just where the story ends.
Plants that don't call me often have something in common: their secondary cone is actually supervised. Not by a person staring at a screen all day, but by automation that reacts faster than any operator can. The Metso IC70C is the version of that automation I see most often on cone crushers. It watches power draw, pressure, oil temperature and feed conditions, then adjusts the crusher setting to keep production going instead of letting a small problem become a trip.
Here's what that means in plain language. On a crusher with IC70C, when conditions start to change, the machine does something about it—it doesn't just light up an alarm and wait. If a spike in pressure is about to trip the crusher, the system responds, adjusts the setting, and logs what happened. That gives a maintenance team something no parts warehouse can give: a record of the problem while it was still small.
What does that have to do with the C106 jaw crusher? In my view, everything. If the cone stops tripping and the circuit stops lurching from one panic stop to the next, the jaw stops being the shock absorber for the whole plant. Feed becomes steady, loads become steady, and wear life starts to look like it should. I've told more than one maintenance manager that the best thing they can do for their jaw crusher might be fixing something on the cone.
In March 2024, at 4:30 in the afternoon, a producer called about a C106 jaw crusher that had stopped right after the shift change. They needed a full set of genuine jaw dies and a toggle assembly on site before 6 a.m. Normal lead time was five working days. We located the parts in a regional depot, arranged a dedicated overnight truck for about $850 in freight, and had everything at their gate by 3:10 a.m. The crew had the crusher running by 7.
What I remember most about that call isn't the parts delivery. It's what the plant manager told me while we were setting it up. I asked how the secondary cone had been running that week. He said it had tripped on high pressure 31 times in five days. Thirty-one times. Every time, someone reset it and went back to work. Nobody asked why it kept happening, and nobody had the data to find out.
Would IC70C have prevented that broken toggle? Not necessarily. A jaw can always hit something it can't handle. But if the cone had been under automation, it probably wouldn't have tripped 31 times. The jaw wouldn't have kept feeding into a dead circuit all week. And the problem that started the chain would have been visible long before Friday's emergency.
That call is the reason I now tell maintenance managers to think about control systems before they increase their parts inventory. Genuine spare parts in a warehouse protect you after something fails. Automation protects you before it fails. One of those saves money. The other just spends it.
I don't want to oversell automation. If your plant only runs a few weeks a year, or your cone crusher already runs with a modern control system that your team actually uses, adding IC70C might not be the right move. The payoff comes from avoiding small problems that turn into big ones. If you don't run enough tonnes for those small problems to show up, the math may not work for you.
Automation also won't fix poor basic maintenance. I've seen crushers with every monitoring option available fail because nobody changed the oil. The IC70C is a control layer, not a substitute for a competent maintenance crew. If you don't have someone who will look at the data it records, you'll be paying for insight that nobody uses.
And let me be honest about my own boundary. I don't design electrical systems and I don't provide automation engineering. If you need an IC70C properly configured, the right answer is to bring in Metso's automation people or their authorized dealer. That's not false modesty. Crusher control is a specialist's job, and I've seen enough damage caused by people who think one universal controller can run any piece of crushing equipment.
So my bottom line is this: don't reflexively cut your parts budget, but don't keep pouring money into spare parts while ignoring why failures keep happening. Ask yourself which problem you're actually buying toward. If the honest answer is that the downstream cone kept tripping and nobody knew why, the smart purchase might not be the next pallet of jaw plates.
After 131 emergency calls, I've stopped assuming that a jaw crusher is to blame just because it's the machine that stopped. Most of those calls pointed me somewhere else first. Take it from someone who has spent too many Friday nights on a rush delivery: the part that breaks is usually the last thing you should investigate.
Our application engineers answer crusher and screen selection questions at no charge.
Ask an Expert