The heel of a bucket rarely fails in a way anyone notices. It does not crack or snap. It just grinds away, cycle after cycle, until the back corner is rounded off and the bucket structure itself starts taking the wear. By the time someone spots it on a walkaround, the fix is a structural repair instead of a replaceable part.
Heel shrouds stop that from happening. They sit over the heel and corner sections of the bucket as a sacrificial wear layer, so the shroud takes the punishment and the bucket does not. When a heel shroud wears out, you replace the shroud. The bucket stays in service.
What heel shrouds do
Every bucket has two ends that take the worst of it. The front edge takes the digging, and that is where teeth and lip shrouds do their work. The heel takes a different kind of wear. As the bucket curls, loads and drags through the pile, the back corners grind against material on every cycle.
That wear is slower than what happens at the lip, which is exactly why it gets missed. Heel shrouds give that trailing zone its own protection, so the part that wears is the one designed to be replaced.
Where they fit
Raptor Heel Shrouds are designed for hydraulic excavator buckets, wheel loader buckets and underground mining buckets. That covers surface and underground mining as well as heavy construction and quarry work.
They earn their keep fastest where heel wear runs hard. Hard rock digging and abrasive ore are the obvious cases, and so is any operation where machines run long shifts and a bucket in the shop means production stops.
The cost case
A heel that wears unprotected ends in one of two places. Either the bucket gets a structural repair, or it gets replaced. Both mean a machine sitting idle and a bill much bigger than any wear part.
A heel shroud moves that cost onto a consumable that wears out on schedule and costs a fraction of a bucket repair. Across a fleet running extended shifts, catching heel wear early is the difference between planned maintenance and an emergency. Protect the heel and the bucket keeps working, which is the only way anyone gets to GSD® on a dig face.
Part of a complete bucket
Heel shrouds do their best work alongside the rest of a bucket wear package. Raptor HEX Lip Shrouds cover the cutting edge, and wear resistant CCO RaptorPlate® liner kits cover the floor and side walls where material slides. Protect all three zones and a bucket runs longer between maintenance stops.
Want to see how RaptorPlate® holds up in the field? One liner package ran five years across four Yukon applications on a single dozer blade.
For a closer look at how heels, lips, teeth and adapters wear, see our guide to reading bucket wear before it costs you.
Why Raptor
Raptor Mining Products has been designing and supplying wear parts and wear protection since 2004. With CISC locations in Edmonton, Barrie, Salt Lake City, Arequipa and Belo Horizonte, Raptor supports operations across North America and Latin America with locally stocked product and engineering support.
Get a Quote
Tell us what bucket you are running and what it is digging, and the Raptor team will come back with heel shroud options for your equipment. → Request a quote
Email: raptor@raptormining.com
Toll free: 1-866-972-7867
International: +1-780-444-1284
PEOPLE. SAFETY. QUALITY. VELOCITY.