XMOR Bucket Lifts Excavator Throughput 43% at Australian Quarry

A bucket does not usually decide how many trucks an excavator can fill in an hour. At LS Quarry, it did.

An XMOR bucket fitted to a 50-tonne class excavator lifted truck throughput from 18 to 25 trucks per hour, and the mechanism behind that jump has little to do with the cutting edge everyone watches. The redesign starts at the rear of the bucket.

Equipment innovation at this level is drawing attention across Australian mining right now, and ONTRAC Group, the Australian manufacturer behind the XMOR range, put its heavy-duty variant in front of the sector at the Queensland Mining and Engineering Exhibition (QME) 2026 in Mackay. The pressure driving that interest is straightforward: sites want more tonnes from the excavator fleets they already own, without a matching rise in capital spend.

This piece gives you three things. First, what the engineering actually does to the physics of a loading cycle. Second, what the documented field outcomes look like when that engineering meets a working pit. Third, which excavator classes and operations the XMOR range is built for. Treat it as practical orientation for Mining and Energy investors and site decision-makers assessing equipment innovation on its merits, not as a product endorsement.

The bucket most excavator operators have never questioned is being redesigned from the rear

Ask most operators where a bucket earns or loses its productivity, and they will point at the front: the teeth, the cutting edge, the wear surface that meets the muck pile. The XMOR mining bucket puts its defining feature somewhere else entirely.

The innovation sits at the rear, in what ONTRAC describes as an inverted keel, a rounded, inverted tub design that forms a modular, self-contained rear section. That shape minimises how much of the bucket drags along the ground during a dig.

Less ground contact means less drag. Less drag means lower wear rates. And lower wear rates mean the bucket does not need as much steel to hold its structural integrity over a working life.

That chain is the whole argument. Because the bucket wears more slowly, it can be built lighter, and XMOR buckets are reported to be 15-30% lighter than conventional equivalents.

Mass optimisation engineering applied to loading and haulage equipment follows the same underlying logic across the supply chain: weight saved on the carrying vessel becomes payload capacity, and that conversion compounds across every cycle in a continuous operation.

Here is the part that matters for production. That saved mass is not discarded; it is converted directly into payload. The excavator swings a lighter bucket on every cycle, and the weight it is no longer carrying as dead steel becomes additional tonnes of ore per pass.

According to ONTRAC Group director Adrian Attwood, the inverted keel and curved cutting edge are designed to improve material flow and allow a higher payload inside the bucket without increasing the total suspended load on the machine. That last point is the engineering trick: more material, same load on the excavator’s arm.

The steel specification behind the weight reduction

None of that works if the lighter bucket wears out faster. This is where the material choice does the heavy lifting.

Each XMOR bucket uses a single layer of SSAB’s Hardox 500 Tuf wear plate alongside Strenx 700 structural steel, which removes the need for the heavy internal wear strips that add mass to conventional designs. The specifications matter for anyone evaluating whether the weight claim is credible:

• Hardox 500 Tuf hardness: 475-505 HBW, roughly 50 HBW higher than the 425-475 HBW of Hardox 450
• Yield strength: approximately 1,300-1,370 MPa, versus 1,200-1,250 MPa for Hardox 450
• Service life: 30-50% longer than Hardox 450 in comparable applications
• Relative service life under granite sliding wear: 85-100% longer than generic 400 HBW steels

That granite figure is the one to hold onto for Australian hard-rock conditions. SSAB’s design principle explains the trade-off directly: designers can keep plate thickness the same to gain up to 40% longer service life, or thin the plate to save weight while holding equivalent service life. XMOR takes the second path, which is why the weight savings do not come at the cost of durability.

The Hardox 500 Tuf product specifications published by SSAB confirm the 475-505 HBW hardness range and the design principle allowing engineers to reduce plate thickness while holding equivalent service life — the material trade-off that underpins the XMOR weight reduction claim.

What a 45% faster truck fill time means across a 24/7 operation

The clearest number in the whole XMOR story comes from LS Quarry, and it landed in May 2025.

An XMOR BHC80 high-production bucket on a 50-tonne class excavator pushed throughput from 700 t/h to over 1,000 t/h. That is a 43% increase, and it did not come from a faster machine or a bigger one.

The anchor figure: throughput rose from 700 tonnes per hour to over 1,000 tonnes per hour, a 43% increase, on the same excavator.

It came from an extra 3 tonnes per swing. That additional payload cut three loading passes off every truck, dropping truck fill time from 3 minutes 20 seconds to 1 minute 45 seconds, an approximate 45% reduction.

Here is why a single eliminated pass is worth more than it first appears. Fewer passes mean the truck leaves the loading bay sooner, which means more trucks cycle through per hour, which compounds relentlessly across a 24-hour operation.

At LS Quarry, that compounding took the site from 18 to 25 trucks per hour, a 39% rise, on one excavator. For a site manager, that is not a marginal gain. Adding seven trucks of hourly capacity without adding a machine changes what capital is needed elsewhere in the fleet.

Digital mining productivity tools — cycle-time monitoring, fleet dispatch optimisation, and real-time load measurement — are what translate a bucket-level payload gain into verified throughput data at the site level, and their adoption is increasingly the precondition for capturing the compounding fleet benefits the LS Quarry results illustrate.

The pattern is not unique to one quarry. Across various sites, XMOR geometry has delivered payload increases of up to 25%, and in specific operational contexts up to 50%, typically shaving one to three passes off a truck cycle, such as turning a five-pass load into a four-pass load.

There is a maintenance dividend too. Reduced dead weight lowers the energy each cycle demands, which extends service intervals on hydraulics, pins, and bushings. For an investor weighing return on investment, that operational leverage on an existing excavator asset is the metric that matters.

Predictive maintenance systems track hydraulic pressure, pin wear, and cycle load data that the XMOR maintenance model generates in the field, and sites running condition-monitoring programmes are better positioned to capture the full service-interval extension the bucket’s reduced dead weight produces.

A product range built for Australian conditions and a maintenance model designed for the pit, not the workshop

Field numbers are only useful if the bucket fits your machine and can be kept running where it works. The XMOR range spans a wide slice of the excavator market:

• BHB-Series: covers 45-136 tonne excavator class, with bucket volumes from approximately 2.66 to 9.20 m³, marketed as 20% or more productive than standard OEM buckets
• D variant: the dedicated mining configuration for heavier conditions, compatible with the 120-400 tonne class, with 600-tonne class support described as forthcoming
• BHC80: the high-production variant deployed in the LS Quarry case

The maintenance model is where the design earns its keep on remote sites. Traditional buckets that need workshop attention come off the machine and go on a truck, costing days of production. XMOR wear parts are bolted on, not welded, which changes the whole calculus:

• Unbolt the worn heel shroud or wing shroud in the field
• Fit the replacement component
• Re-torque to specification
• Return the excavator to production in hours, not days

For a remote Australian mine, that matters as much as the payload figures. A bucket serviced in the pit without a workshop trip directly reduces the cost and scheduling burden of planned maintenance windows.

The supply chain behind the range is deliberately domestic. ONTRAC manufactures the XMOR buckets in Australia under an exclusive licence from Swedish steelmaker SSAB, which owns the underlying patent and intellectual property. ONTRAC has held that manufacturing licence since 2021, with the official “Australian Made” logo licence for the 50-120 tonne class awarded separately in May 2022.

That local footprint went on show when ONTRAC debuted the heavy-duty D variant, complete with Australian Made labelling, at QME 2026 at the Mackay Showgrounds from 21-23 July 2026.

What the XMOR data means for Australian mine sites weighing the upgrade

One quarry does not settle the question. The useful read is which operational conditions make the XMOR case strongest, so a site can judge whether its own profile matches. The proposition is at its most compelling in:

• High-utilisation continuous operations, where every saved cycle repeats around the clock
• Sites running tight truck-to-excavator ratios, where faster truck rotation frees fleet capacity
• Applications where pass reduction compounds most, turning a single eliminated pass into a fleet-level gain

There is a durability distinction worth drawing. Research flagged in the field notes a general risk: aftermarket buckets that achieve weight savings purely by using less steel, without matching material or engineering upgrades, court faster wear and structural fatigue. XMOR’s use of Hardox 500 Tuf is what separates weight saved through better materials from weight saved by simply removing steel.

Independent context helps calibrate any service-life claim.

Chalmers University research puts typical bucket lifetimes in severe underground conditions at around 8,000 operating hours, with lips replaced after 500-1,500 hours. That is the baseline against which any durability claim should be measured.

Compatibility is the other check. A bucket must match OEM pin spacing, pin-to-pin dimensions, and ear geometry, because a mismatch can alter breakout forces, degrade machine balance, and accelerate wear.

Sites also tend to demand field evidence of equal or superior service life before leaving proven OEM equipment behind, and the LS Quarry and related deployments are the current body of that commercial evidence. For a Mining and Energy investor, the question is not whether the bucket works in one case; it is whether the sites under evaluation share the profile where XMOR delivers its strongest documented outcomes.

Where the bucket fits in a sector actively repricing operational efficiency

QME 2026 tells you the Australian mining equipment market is in an active evaluation phase. More than 9,000 registered attendees and 370 exhibitors turned up in Mackay, comfortably beating pre-event forecasts, and the XMOR D variant’s reception was one data point inside that broader appetite for productivity technology.

The names in the Mining Pavilion are the reason that reception matters. The operators present included:

Australian mining contractors, including the Macmahon and Thiess names present at QME 2026, occupy a structural position in equipment adoption decisions: their fleet-scale purchasing power and multi-site visibility means a bucket technology that passes contractor evaluation tends to propagate faster than one trialled only at owner-operated sites.

• Glencore
• BHP Mitsubishi Alliance
• Whitehaven Coal
• Stanmore Resources
• Macmahon
• Thiess
• Mackellar Group

These are the exact decision-makers who would evaluate a bucket upgrade at fleet scale. Their presence at a showcase where the D variant debuted gives the product’s commercial trajectory its most credible context.

ONTRAC’s structural position sits well against where procurement is heading. Its exclusive SSAB licence and Australian manufacturing base speak directly to supply-chain resilience and local content, criteria that carry increasing weight in mining tenders. Industry lobbyists estimate miners already source about 88% of goods and services locally, though that figure should be read as an industry estimate rather than a verified statistic.

The forward signal is the 600-tonne class support described as forthcoming for the D variant. That points at the largest excavator classes in Australian mining, where pass reduction and cycle-time gains carry the greatest per-site financial impact, and it is where the next phase of this story will be decided.

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with financial professionals before making investment decisions. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and product performance figures cited here are drawn from specific site deployments and may not reflect outcomes in other operating conditions.