Modern Mining December 2018

BULK MATERIALS HANDLING

therefore we stay busy,” the team members say. “Obviously, once the min- ing market turns up, we will also have an opportunity to supply new capital projects in mining. The market for heavy materials handling equipment is fiercely com- petitive but an advantage we have is that the SCHADE b r and name i s h i gh l y regarded in mining circles with SCHADE products having an extremely good reputation for being reliable and cost-effective.” While the SCHADE line remains core to the ACH business, the company has diversified since founding

into the maintenance and repair of mechani- cal equipment on the mines and at power stations. It has multiple crews that travel to site to undertake assignments and they are backed up by ACH’s workshop and fabrication facility – which has 55 full-time employees – located in the Highveld Industrial Park near eMalahleni. “We were originally focused on maintain- ing SCHADE’s installed base of equipment but increasingly we found that there was scope to extend our services to all the materials handling installations and mechanical equipment typi- cally found at the mines and power stations,” says the team. “The range of work we undertake is very broad and includes – just to give a few examples – repairs to draglines and conveyor structures and the replacement of slew rings. Basically, we can undertake anything structural or mechanical. Refurbishments are also part of our offering and we’ve just completed a large excavator shovel for a client.” They add that assisting at power station shutdowns has also proved a fruitful field. “We currently have well over 200 people on site at one of the big thermal power stations working on a 100-day shutdown. This has now become an important part of the business.” ACH is keen to execute entire materials handling projects – from design, through fab- rication, machining, civils and earthworks, erection, to final commissioning. “We have all the necessary skills. We’ve worked on virtu- ally every aspect of typical materials handling systems and there is no reason why we can- not put everything together and implement entire systems as the main contractor. We’ve

just completed a study on a new stockpile con- veyor system for one of the local mines and we are more than capable of delivering this on a turnkey basis should the mine go ahead with the project.” ACH is also actively considering branch- ing into the design and manufacture of its own equipment. “We obviously will not develop products that would compete with the SCHADE range but pretty much everything else is on the table.” Looking to the future, the team members say they have a vision for ACH to become a leading African engineering and maintenance company in the commodity sector, operating not just in Africa but also globally. “This is an admittedly ambitious goal but we cannot see any reason why an African company cannot achieve it. We are very competitive and produce top-quality work and it is just a question of time before we expand from our roots in the Mpumalanga coal- fields,” they conclude. 

A SCHADE 2 300 t/h circular bridge reclaimer harrow structure on a 120 m diameter ROM coal stockyard near eMalahleni, South Africa.

An ACH 4-ton truck delivering two support wheels for a rotary breaker.

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December 2018  MODERN MINING  33