Using FLSmidth’s Peregrine and Hawk Lines to Cut Emergency Downtime: A Practical Checklist

Who This Checklist Is For

If you’re a process optimization manager at a mine or cement plant, and you’ve got FLSmidth’s Peregrine or Hawk lines installed—or you’re evaluating them—this is for you. Specifically, it’s for the person who’s tired of mid-shift calls from a supervisor saying a mill is down and the only spare part is on a ship somewhere.

I’ve handled about 80-plus emergency field service requests in the last four years, many of them involving these two FLSmidth product families. This checklist is not theory. It’s what actually reduced our monthly emergency requests by roughly 40% over three quarters.

There are five steps, but the one most people skip is Step 3. Don’t skip Step 3.

Step 1: Map Which Equipment Is Truly Critical

It sounds obvious, but I mean really map it. Not just ‘the crusher is critical.’ You need the specific sub-components on your Peregrine and Hawk units that, if they fail, stop production.

For the Peregrine line, the drive train and bearing assemblies are the common failure points in coarse-crushing applications. For the Hawk series of fine crushers, the wear liners and wedge-lock pins are what we saw reliability issues with—especially in high-iron-feed scenarios. I don’t have hard data on industry-wide failure rates for these, but based on the units I’ve worked on, about 60% of emergency calls involve those three sub-systems. Not the motors. Not the frames. The mechanical interfaces.

Action item: Walk your site’s FLSmidth equipment with the OEM manual in hand. Mark the ‘red’ (non-redundant) items. That’s your emergency prevention list.

Step 2: Focus on the Peregrine Coarse-Crushing Station

Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in the Peregrine line at first. It looked like a redesign of a rotary breaker, and I thought the automation features were overhyped. But after seeing three deployments in copper operations, the value shows up in throughput consistency—not raw capacity. A stable feed directly reduces the chance of plugging events that cascade into emergency downtime.

What I’ve learned is that the Peregrine’s ability to handle variable feed particle size (from 150mm down to 25mm) without constant adjustment means your downstream mills don’t see shock loads. Less shock load means fewer emergency service calls on the grinding circuit.

Checklist item for this step:
- Has the Peregrine’s auto-gap adjustment been calibrated in the last 90 days?
- Is the screen deck free of irregular wear spots?
- Do you have a stock of the high-wear ceramic inserts for the crushing zone?

Step 3: Integrate Automation Monitoring—Not Just a Dashboard

This is the step ninety percent of teams skip. They install the FLSmidth control system that comes with the Peregrine or Hawk, and they set up a dashboard in a control room. That’s not enough.

I mean actually integrate the vibration and temperature data from the Hawk’s bearings into your predictive maintenance workflow. Most people look at a dashboard once a day. What you need is a threshold-based alert that generates a work order when a bearing on the Hawk hits 85°C for more than ten minutes. We implemented this last year. In the first thirty days, we caught two bearing anomalies before they became catastrophic failures. Both were on Hawk units.

If you don’t have the internal logic for that, FLSmidth’s automation team can set it up as a custom rule. It took us about six hours to configure. The savings in avoided emergency repairs? Easily five figures per event.

Step 4: Create a Spare Parts Pre-Agreement for the Hawk Wear Liners

The Hawk’s wear liners are not standard-shaped parts. They’re machined to the specific bow configuration of that unit. If you run out of stock, you’re looking at nine to fourteen days lead time from the FLSmidth distribution center—assuming normal shipping. If it breaks on a Thursday night, you’re looking at premium freight costs that equal the price of the part itself.

Here’s what works: enter into a yearly consignment stock agreement with FLSmidth for the top five wear liner variants on your Hawk units. You pay for the parts only when you use them, but the inventory sits at your site. The upfront cost is lower than emergency purchasing, and the lead time protection is real. I’ve never fully understood why more sites don’t do this. If someone has a good reason, I’d honestly love to hear it—because it’s saved us three times in the last eighteen months.

Step 5: Conduct a Once-Quarterly ‘Quick Fit’ Simulation

Even after setting up the consignment agreement for the Hawk liners, I kept second-guessing whether we had the right torque tools and lifting fixtures on hand. The last thing you want is to have the part but lack the tooling to install it during a shutdown window.

Once per quarter, physically simulate replacing a worn liner on a Hawk unit or a drive component on a Peregrine. Time the process. Note the tools that were missing or worn out. Update your tooling inventory. This uncovered that three of our torque wrenches had drifted out of calibration by 12–18%. Would have resulted in a failed torque application during an actual emergency changeout.

I wish I had tracked those calibration gaps more carefully from the start. What I can say anecdotally is that after four quarterly simulations, our average changeout time dropped by 22%.

Common Mistakes and Summary

A few pitfalls to watch for:

• Don’t treat the Peregrine and Hawk as interchangeable. The Peregrine handles rougher feeds; the Hawk is for final sizing. Their maintenance needs differ.
• Don’t rely on OEM recommended spare lists alone. They’re a good baseline, but your site’s ore chemistry and feed size distribution make your failure patterns unique.
• Don’t forget the software component. The FLSmidth automation ecosystem is powerful, but only if you configure the right alert thresholds.

I don’t have a perfect success rate—one of our Hawk units still had an unplanned bearing failure in March 2024 because a sensor wire snapped and the alert went unread for twelve hours. We live and learn. That’s why Step 3 matters so much. Get the sensor data into your workflow, not just a siloed display.

Bottom line: the combination of proactive mapping (Step 1), component focus (Steps 2 and 4), and genuine automation integration (Step 3) transforms these FLSmidth lines from great equipment to reliable assets that rarely generate emergency calls.