Horizon belt protection at Drakelands
Conveyor equipment company supplies integral components for 11 conveyors at new tungsten mine
HORIZON Conveyor Equipment Ltd are supplying some of the integral components for 11 conveyors that will be used at the new £130 million Drakelands tungsten and tin mine at Hemerdon, near Plymouth, when it opens next year.
Horizon’s package of bespoke products includes idler sets, stainless steel rollers, specially designed v-ploughs for belt return scraping, skirt rubbers and tracking equipment.
The conveyors are being designed, built and installed by South Devon-based Centristic Ltd, specialists in material-handling systems. Centristic were contracted for the project by Australian engineering firm GR Engineering Services, who are building the processing plant at Drakelands for mine developers Wolf Minerals.
Operations are scheduled to start at the open-pit mine in mid-2015, making it the first new metal mine to be opened in Britain for 45 years.
As part of their role in the project, Horizon were commissioned to design and manufacture low-profile v-ploughs that could be accommodated into the very shallow areas of the conveyor system. These were designed and built in house at the company’s Halesowen factory, in the West Midlands. Together with Horizon’s SCA primary and S-Type secondary scrapers, they will provide a complete conveyor belt cleaning solution for all conveyors at the mine site.
In addition, conveyor belt widths of 800mm, 1,000mm and 1,800mm will be carried by more than 2,800 Horizon idlers, which were constructed in house using the company’s new CNC lathes and welding machines. Horizon have also supplied their own quick-release skirt clamp systems and skirting rubbers that seal the conveyors in areas where there is a risk of materials spilling off the belts.
Alan Bowler, managing director of Horizon Conveyor Equipment, said: ‘We are very proud to be playing a role in the development of the Drakelands mine. Like all our projects, we have provided advice, specialist design and build services to ensure that these products meet the specifications of Centristic and the mine operator.
‘By manufacturing 95% of our products in house, our design team have the flexibility to produce project-specific components to a very high standard at low cost. That makes this a real UK design-and-build success story.’
Tungsten was discovered near Hemerdon in 1867 and the site is now recognized by the British Geological Survey as the fourth largest tungsten resource in the world. Mining took place during both World Wars and planning permission to reopen the mine was granted in 1986, with speciality metals company Wolf Minerals becoming involved in the project in 2007 and leading it successfully through to a start on site in March 2014.
The open-pit mine will measure 850m in length x 450m in width and will reach a depth of 200m. Annual production at the mine is expected to reach 5,000 tonnes of tungsten concentrate and 1,000 tonnes of tin concentrate.
