Tunisian Cat dealer Parenin SA rebuilds a D7F from scratch in two months

Bouchamaoui Industrie is one of the oldest Oil and Gas contractors in Tunisia. With an experience of more than hundred years, the company handles business mainly in the iron construction, welding and long distance pipe installation. Since 1900, three generations of the Bouchamaoui family have led the company through more than thousand projects in Tunisia and its neighbouring countries.

One of the means for Bouchamaoui Industrie to stay competitive and resist in the economical turmoil is to keep their equipment fleet, consisting primarily of Caterpillar machinery such as hydraulic excavators, track-type tractors, pipelayers, wheel loaders and motor graders, up-to-date. Indeed, the company recently took a decision to progressively renew their fleet menacing to turn too old and thus unproductive.

“Since renewing a fleet of equipment rapidly requires a strong financial investment, instead of buying new machines, we proposed the rebuild,” Anouar Ben Ammar, Executive Manager from the local Caterpillar dealer Parenin SA explains. “This option is very economic. We have finished rebuilding the first machine, a D7F track-type tractor, for a price that is 40 percent of the price of a new machine. This also includes a one-year warranty period. Given the D7F was no longer in use but was dumped as scrap, the rebuild was a great choice not only economically but also ecologically.”

With the changes the D7F underwent during the overhaul, the machine now certainly is as close to a new machine as a used piece of equipment can be: “We rebuilt the transmission and undercarriage, straightened up the blade and ripper, changed the hoses, redid the electric installation and replaced the old engine with a new one. We also sandblasted and repainted the structure,” Anouar Ben Ammar says.

The rebuilt followed a very aggressive process; the machine was completely redone in two months. A team of four experienced technicians worked eight hours a day to make the delivery in time possible. The D7F will now return to work as a pipelayer installing pipes for trenches and for road construction. It in this job, in the Sahara desert, it had already clocked up more than 40,000 hours since it was purchased in the early 70’s. Now it’s time for the second life.