HIGH PROFILE-TYRES_proof 24/08/2016 08:55 Page 1
HIGH PROFILE
Talking tyres
Paul Moore spoke to mining tyre management stalwart Tony Cutler,
who recently parted company with Otraco International Pty Ltd
after 38 years and formed his own mining tyre consultancy – OTR
GLOBAL. Cutler is one of the industry’s leading specialists in
earthmover tyre management and brings more than four decades of
mining and OTR tyre experience to his new company and its clients
utler’s journey in the mining industry began
with graduation from the University of
Queensland with a Bachelor of Mining
Engineering degree, after which he joined
Hamersley Iron in 1974 as a graduate engineer at
Paraburdoo. His career progression started at the
bottom – working as a pit labourer on the cable
crew manually feeding heavy electric shovel and
drill power cable into and out of a ‘boat’ towed
behind a Caterpillar 824 dozer. He progressed to
haul truck driver, drill offsider, haul truck instructor
and mine production foreman. He finally moved into
an engineering role, initially as a grade control
engineer – which was relatively complex at
Paraburdoo because of the heterogeneous, high
impurity nature of the orebody – and then as a mine
planning engineer.
He joined Otraco in 1977 as technical services
engineer. He knew nothing about tyres at that point
– as his mining engineering studies did not cover
them (most university and mining school courses
still barely touch on tyre management) – so he once
again started at the bottom, learning by work
experience and mentoring from the company’s
founder and its senior engineer. He also undertook a
study trip to Japan visiting the head office and two
factories from each of Bridgestone, Yokohama and
Toyo – three of the major OTR tyre manufactures at
the time. He tells IM that he is still learning.
C
Otraco experience worldwide
Key events during his period with Otraco include
starting and running the company’s first overseas
operation at Rio Tinto’s Kelian gold mine in
Indonesia in 1994; a two-and-a-half year stint in
Chile managing the Escondida project and directing
South American operations; and leading the project
start-ups at Vale’s Carajas and Sossego mines in
Brazil; and at Rio Tinto’s IOC operation in Canada.
He also conducted the technical audit of Anglo
American’s Mogalakwena tyre operation that
eventually led to the company’s first onsite
management contract in southern Africa.
Cutler has done tyre consulting for mines in
Australia, the US, Indonesia, Peru, Colombia,
Argentina, Chile, Canada, Brazil, Ghana, South Africa
and Botswana. He was involved in the development
of tyre analysis techniques such as batching and
axle fitment bias compensation and has led several
investigations into tyre explosion events including
144 International Mining | SEPTEMBER 2016
the Radomiro Tomic fatality in 2000. Cutler has
authored a number of technical and OTR tyre related
papers, including two major reports on the status of
the global OTR tyre market. The first, in 2004,
predicted the crisis in mining tyre supply; an update
followed in 2007.
The OTR GLOBAL offering
OTR GLOBAL is Cutler’s Perth based consultancy. It
specialises in mining tyre management including
selection, procurement, maintenance, operation,
awareness and safety. Cutler states: “While the
decade long OTR tyre supply crisis – which
accompanied the China initiated boom in mining
commodity prices – focussed the attention of mining
companies on the importance of properly managing
their tyres, there remain many opportunities for
assisting companies to maximise the potential of
their tyres, in particular longevity and productivity –
and, importantly, to manage these processes safely.”
Cutler says that there are still many misconceptions
about and much poor understanding of mining tyre
application, for example:
n Being unaware that tyre maintenance of mine
equipment is ten times more likely to result in a
fatality than non-tyre maintenance of rubber
tyred mining vehicles
n Believing that hard (engineering) controls will
compensate for inadequate tyre maintenance
training and procedures or poor culture
n Thinking that worn out tyres signify tyre life
maximisation
n Being reluctant to fit new tyres to the rear of haul
trucks, unappreciative of the benefits this can
deliver
n Not understanding that poor roads result in haul
truck damage costing several tim