Why should you pay a couple of quid more for a genuine Thwaites part from the Thwaites dumper factory at Leamington Spa when an after-market one is supposedly just as good?

That’s a question that is often asked and the answer has always been ‘you pay your money, you take’s you chance’ kind of one!!! There is always a place in the world for after-market spare parts, the secret is to do your homework and use a supplier who you can trust and you know has done the relevant checks etc to ensure that the product they offer is of a comparable quality to the genuine one.

Recently we sold some Yanmar 3TNV88 engines to a customer to fit into Thwaites 3 Tonne dumpers. As the largest supplier of Yanmar TNV engines in the country we know that the Yanmar product is a quality product that will last thousands of hours if it’s treated correctly. All you need to do is give it good oil, fuel and air and change the filters on a regular basis and the engine will go on and on. This customer had three Thwaites dumpers that were increasingly hard to start as we descended into winter which is a tell- tale sign of a lack of compression with either the piston rings or the bore worn.

It’s unusual to have three Thwaites dumpers of different ages in a fleet all going down with the same Yanmar TNV engine problem at the same time. I told the customer to check the air filter to which he replied that he had recently changed all three filters again to try and remedy the situation so I told him to take the hose from the back of the air filter off and look down. On doing this he found that the inside of the hose was coated in dust which effectively means that the Yanmar TNV engine was using dirty air in the compression process instead of clean.

On the air filter assembly in the Thwaites dumper the air filter is held in place by the air filter end cap which seals the filter at either end thus making all the air sucked into the Yanmar TNV engine go through the filter before entering the engine. The customer wasn’t using genuine Thwaites air filters, they looked identical if you put them side-by-side but when I asked him to measure them the after-market one was 2.5 mm shorter than a genuine Thwaites one. This means that the filter wasn’t securely sealed in the housing and therefore dirty air was being sucked in. In fairness you would never know when you fitted it as it would appear to fit in the housing and you’d never realise there was a gap.

A new Yanmar 3TNV88 engine for a Thwaites 3 Tonne dumper is over £3500, when you take into consideration the transportation of the dumper back to the workshop, the machine down time, the Engineers time to take it out and fit a new one and the transportation back to site you are probably looking at a bill of over £4500. A genuine Thwaites air filter is just over £30 and after market one is probably around £20 so a massive saving of £10. If you said that a Thwaites dumper does 200-300 hours a year you are going to change that filter once a year, over a ten-year period that means saving a massive £100 if you use after-market filters as opposed to genuine Thwaites filters.

If you think that saving £100 over ten years on your Thwaites dumper is worth the risk of having to spend £4500 on a new Yanmar TNV engine I would recommend that you don’t take up gambling as a profession.

There is a reason why genuine Thwaites parts are better than after-market ones and that is because you know that they are the correct part for the job……… guaranteed.

To save money in the long-run always use genuine Thwaites parts on your Thwaites dumper, as the largest supplier of Thwaites, Terex, Terex/JCB and Barford parts in the country PES always have large stocks of genuine Thwaites parts on the shelf ready for next day deliver.

Keep it genuine Thwaites parts…..you know it makes.