Liebherr-Australia’s hose production facility in Adelaide has recently been certified to ISO 9001 and MDG41 standards, which Liebherr says reinforces its core value of ‘quality in everything we do’.
The hose production plant is located within the 12,000-square-metre Liebherr national distribution centre in Adelaide’s north-eastern suburbs, a facility that also hosts Liebherr-Australia’s head office complex.
The manufacturing process has built-in control points to ensure quality at key points, and records are kept at each of these stages. Each hose assembly manufactured at the plant is given an individual serial number for full traceability and comes with individual hose assembly test documentation on request.
All materials received and used are supplied by Liebherr’s official OEM factories, while a rigorous quality management process is in place to ensure the raw materials comply with Liebherr, customer, and international technical requirements before being used for assembly operations.
The manufacturing facility has dedicated lines for its low, medium, and high pressure manufacturing, feeding into the 8-inch-diameter, 450-tonne crimp force press. It has additional capability to test hose assemblies up to 1,500 bar in the 5m dual-bed test bench – exceeding normal operating conditions.
The facility manufactures a wide range of hoses to suit different Liebherr models, often requiring custom designs for specific applications. Liebherr-Australia’s product designers consider factors such as pressure, wear resistance, product temperature, chemical resistance, material being transported, exposure factors such as UV and flange orientation when creating the different hoses.
Recently, the Liebherr-Australia team were contacted at midday on a Sunday by a customer who needed high-pressure assemblies to support a machine breakdown in far north Queensland. Liebherr says the hoses were manufactured the same day, and were on a plane bound for Queensland by that afternoon.