It was a Thursday afternoon in May 2023 when the crack was found in the concave of our HP200 cone crusher. The liner had done just over 4,000 tons. The genuine Metso set before it had done 21,000 tons. This one came from a supplier I won’t name here, mostly because I still can’t prove the failure was their fault. What I can prove is what it cost us.
What still bothers me is that I approved that order. What bothers me more is that I almost approved the same decision again in spring 2024.
Every buyer of Metso HP200 crusher parts knows this dance. The authorized distributor sends a quote. It hurts. Two days later, another supplier offers a part that “directly replaces” the same part number, claims the same manganese, and lands 20–25% below. When your job is to protect a maintenance budget, that discount looks less like a risk and more like a win.
The obvious problem at our plant was the one in that situation: genuine Metso parts looked overpriced. But after reviewing roughly $300,000 in crusher wear parts invoices since 2017, I’ve decided we were comparing the wrong number the whole time. We were comparing price per part. We should have been comparing cost per ton crushed.
That is not a cute phrase. If a liner costs 20% less but lasts 40% shorter, the cheap part is the expensive one. The trouble is that you don’t know that until the part has been running for months. Most budget reviews don’t wait that long.
What I mean is this: a liner sitting in a warehouse is just cast steel. What actually crushes rock is the metallurgy, the geometry, the heat treatment, and how all of that matches your feed size, crusher setting, and circuit. None of that shows up on a quote sheet.
After the failure, I started collecting material certificates alongside quotes. The differences showed up quickly. Manganese levels varied. Hardness values varied. A couple of suppliers sent certificates only after three reminders. Two never sent one. If a replacement part is truly identical, heat numbers are easy to provide. The silence tells you something.
We also had no data. Our HP200 is equipped with Metso’s IC70C automation, which reports power draw, pressure, and crusher setting. The plant scale gives us the tons. We just weren’t connecting those data points, so we couldn’t say what a liner set actually produced before it wore out. “Cheap” was measured in dollars on an invoice, not in tons per dollar.
In May 2023, we ordered three liner sets for the HP200 from an independent supplier. The quote sat $1,340 below the genuine Metso price per set. Total paper saving: $4,020. I remember approving that order and feeling like I was doing my job.
The first concave cracked at just over 4,000 tons. Normal life for that crushing chamber, based on our own change-out logs, had been 18,000 to 24,000 tons. The timing was terrible. There is no overhead crane above that crusher, so liner changes depend on a rented gantry crane—which we had returned two days earlier. Emergency freight for a replacement concave cost $820. Bringing the crane back, with transport, cost $580. Overtime for the fitters and the rigger cost $1,650.
The HP200 was down from Thursday evening to Friday evening. We calculated lost margin at $4,800. Add it up: $820 + $580 + $1,650 + $4,800 = $7,850. The $4,020 we saved on paper turned into a $3,830 loss before we even discussed the two unused liner sets in the warehouse, which we no longer trusted enough to install.
Here is the honest part: I still cannot prove the failure was caused by poor metallurgy. It could have been a feed problem or simply bad luck. The supplier stopped answering emails in the second week, so we never got a useful answer. That silence taught me more than the crack did.
That audit changed how I review every maintenance purchase, not just crusher wear parts. The pattern repeated in places that seemed less risky.
Our crusher floor sump pump is a good example. A rebuilt impeller cost 30% less than the factory part and looked fine on paper. It wore out in about half the time. The pump didn’t fail dramatically; it just lost capacity, which meant more frequent changeouts, more labor, and one messy cleanup when the collection pit came close to overflowing.
The same logic applied when one of our Metso HGMS magnetic separators needed a matrix rebuild. The lower-cost matrix material seemed like a reasonable place to save money. The separator’s throughput drifted downward until we stopped the line and did the rebuild a second time with the material the original design specified. The discount disappeared in the first week of lost performance.
I don’t automatically reject every quote below the distributor’s price. But every quote now has to win in the cost-per-ton review, not just in the price-per-piece column.
For critical wear parts, we ask five questions before a purchase order goes out:
Our operation is not large. That used to make me hesitate before calling the OEM; I assumed our orders were too small to deserve application support. That hesitation was expensive. In spring 2024, when a new low quote appeared, we called the Metso distributor about an updated concave profile for our HP200 instead. They checked the crusher serial number, confirmed a different liner configuration, and answered our follow-up questions in the same afternoon. Small doesn’t mean unimportant when you ask the right questions.
The price of a part is the number on the invoice. The cost of a part is what you pay when it stops your plant on a Thursday afternoon. I compare those two numbers now.
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