On the back of a successful supply and installation of a 3,000,000 tonne per annum iron ore crushing and screening plant in the Central Pilbara during 2010, MAX Plant have secured a contract for a major plant expansion at the same site ramping up capacity to 5,000,000 tons per year.
The publicly listed client has made major inroads into the WA mining industry in recent years and MAX Plant remains their preferred source of crushing, screening and materials handling equipment.
The original plant was commissioned to produce a minus 10mm hematite DSO comprising of a primary feeder unit, secondary and tertiary cone crushers feeding onto triple deck screens, then being sampled before finally being stockpiled utilizing radial conveyors.
The plant upgrade was installaed in the second quarter of 2012 introducting of Striker JM1310 primary jaw crusher. This crusher weighs in at 100 ton to handle any oversize presented in the feed material from the surface miner. Additional MAX Plant Conveyors, Feed Bins and electrical upgrades, along with a MAX Plant 32m long radial Stacker to handle the increased capacity of the plant.
Project Manager in charge of the upgrade for MAX Plant, Jim Hamill comments, “during an evaluation process the client hired from MAX Plant extensive hire fleet, a Striker JM1310 jaw crusher, another crusher from an Irish based manufacturer and finally another crusher of European origin. What better way for the client to ensure they were making an informed decision than to test 3 different crushers in their site and all in exactly the same application. It became apparent quite early in the evaluation process that neither of the imported machines could perform to the level of the Striker; in fact reports from site indicate that the foreign machines were only capable of processing around 600 tph with regular stoppages whereas the Striker JM1310 consistently produced 1000 tph. It is quite obvious that the light weight imported machines are ideally suited to concrete recycling in capital cities. But when dealing with the extreme conditions encountered on mine sites in Australia nothing can perform as well as a MAX Plant.
A paramount design feature of MAX Plant is our ability to add extra capacity whether it be primary, secondary or tertiary to any of our plants without the need for expensive shut downs or relocations. To double this plants capacity took no longer than a few weeks from MAX Plant’s arrival onsite. With iron ore sales at high prices our client could not be happier with the speed in which this project can be delivered.