Modern Mining June 2016

COVER STORY

Sleipner provides mine site

The movement of heavy tracked mining equipment – such as excavators and shovels, drill rigs and bulldozers – around mine sites, or even from one mine site to another, is typi- cally an expensive and time consuming operation which can impact severely on production. But this need not be the case. Transport solutions developed by Sleipner Finland and available locally through JCR Equipment, trading as Sleipner Africa, address the problem in a highly effective way, offering dramatic time savings that can significantly increase productivity and reduce machine wear. Modern Mining recently spoke to Sleipner Africa’s MD, Rory Hollins, to learn more about Sleipner’s ingenious systems.

the very truck that is being loaded by an exca- vator can then be used to tow the excavator to a new site. The process of putting the excavator on wheels takes just minutes. The machine is first reversed onto the dolly so that the rear of the undercarriage is off the ground. The bucket of the excavator is then placed in the bed of the truck and the machine is lifted using its own hydraulics. The whole assemblage effec- tively becomes a wheeled truck-and-trailer combination which can move at speeds of up to 15 km/h. Once the excavator arrives at its new work site, the process is simply reversed and the machine can be operational within a few minutes. “The Sleipner system is so simple that one almost wonders why it took so long for anyone to come up with the idea,” says Hollins. “The benefits, of course, are huge. On most mines, excavators can spend up to 15 % of their time travelling. With Sleipner, travel time can be reduced by as much as 85 % – which trans- lates into huge productivity gains. Moreover, use of the system typically doubles, or even triples, undercarriage life, which means that maintenance costs and service downtime are

S leipner Finland was founded in 1997 by an excavator operator, Ossi Kortesalmi, who was then working at a chrome mine in the Finnish Artic. Troubled by the loss of pro- ductivity involved in moving tracked excava- tors around site, he came up with the simple – yet revolutionary – idea of giving tracked machines a set of wheels through the use of a dolly system. The beauty of the system is that

The DB120 system can transport the world’s biggest bulldozers such as the D475 seen here.

16  MODERN MINING  June 2016