Back in June we wrote about loading a Fuchs OEM orange peel grapple onto a truck at our Miami warehouse, bound for a scrap operation in Panama. That post ended with the truck doors closing. This one is the other end of the trip: the grapple has been delivered to the customer's yard, it is going to work on their Fuchs MHL 350, and earlier this month a Fuchs representative and a Fuchs mechanic joined our ICP Panama team on site to train the crew that runs it.
We ship a lot of attachments. Most of them clear customs and go to work without anyone from the factory ever seeing the site. This one got the full treatment, and the pictures were too good to keep to ourselves.
A Delivery Is Not the Finish Line
The easy version of this story is that a crate arrived and someone signed for it. The version that matters to a scrap yard is what happens over the next twelve months: whether the operators run the grapple the way it was designed to be run, whether the maintenance crew knows what to check and when, and whether the attachment is still cycling at full speed a year from now.
That is why we asked Fuchs to send people. A Fuchs representative and a Fuchs mechanic came to the site, and together with our Panama team we spent the day with the yard's operators and mechanics.
Walk-Around: The Machine and the Attachment
The day started outside, at the machine. The Fuchs MHL 350 is a workhorse in Latin American scrap yards, and this one is the carrier for the 5-tine grapple we shipped. The Fuchs team walked the crew around the machine and the attachment: the hydraulic lines feeding the rotator and the open/close circuit, the grease points on the tine pivots and the rotator, and what a properly closed set of tines should look like on an uneven load.
Then it went lower. The whole group got down at the undercarriage to go through the daily and weekly inspection points, which are the things that are easy to skip on a machine that runs two shifts and expensive to skip for long.
Seat Time
An orange peel grapple rewards good technique. Open wide, drop onto the pile, close in one motion, lift, rotate, release. Do it right and you fill a container in fewer passes and put less shock into the rotator and the tines. Do it wrong and you chew through tine tips and seals.
So the operators each got seat time with the Fuchs representative at the cab door, going through the joystick functions for the rotator and the grapple, the difference between grabbing and dragging, and how to work the pile without overloading the attachment.
The Classroom Part
After the yard, the office. The Fuchs team went through the documentation on a laptop: service intervals, the parts that wear and how to spot them early, and what is worth keeping on the shelf. For a scrap yard that list is short but critical. Tine tips, rotator seals, hoses, and pins. When one of those goes, the machine stops.
That list is also exactly what we stock in Miami and move through our Panama hub, which is the whole point of having a hub there.
Why We Do It This Way
We could have shipped the grapple and moved on. But a customer who buys an OEM Fuchs attachment is not buying a piece of steel, they are buying uptime, and uptime depends on the people running and maintaining the machine as much as on the iron. Factory training on the day of delivery is the cheapest insurance either side can buy.
It also says something about how Fuchs and ICP work together. Fuchs sent people to a yard in Panama because the sale came through us, and our Panama team was there because that is what the hub is for: local presence, local follow-up, and a short line back to Miami for parts.
If you run Fuchs material handlers in Panama, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, or anywhere across the region, we keep OEM Fuchs attachments and wear parts in inventory, and for a new attachment we can arrange factory support on site. Submit an RFQ with the model and serial range, or contact the team directly and we will take it from there.
For the machine itself, Fuchs, a Terex brand, publishes the full specifications and attachment options for the MHL 350 on their site.
For the background on the attachment itself, the 5-tine design, and why OEM matters on the rotator, Part 1 covers all of that.
Ready to talk parts or service?
Call us at (305) 477-6612 or email sales@icpmiami.com. Our Full Service Center is at 5960 NW 99 Ave, Unit 9, Miami, FL 33178.
