My new client and Quarry update

[realzed]

I don't see any drills - do they not need to blast off the face every now and then to free up whatever rock will be needed - or is the formation such that it is easily broken up just using mechanical means and equipment?  
Around here any quarries with a face that tall would have to be drilled and layers peeled off in order to free up the product - but I'm talking PreCambrian Shield type of structure which is probably the hardest type of rock available in the World..  

[Ianab]

Possibly it's more like a loose volcanic mix, rather than solid rock. Locally the old lahar flows from the Mt are a random mix, from sandy ash up to boulders the size of a cars, all packed in together. A face like that would be stable to work around, but an excavator can pick away at it without explosives. Then it's all fed into a crusher / screening plant to get the various grades of rock.  

This is one of the quarries around the other side of the Mt. The current excavation is to the right of the road, and the overburden / ash is being moved to the old site to fill in the holes and revert it to pasture again. 

Google Maps

The main quarry on this side is working in an old riverbed near the National Park. Over the years tons of rock have been deposited there from higher up the Mt, but a similar scenario with a mix of river rocks, gravel and sand, loosely compacted. 

[Ljohnsaw]

Pilot or passenger?

Passenger on Iberia airlines jet.

[teakwood]

don't see any drills - do they not need to blast off the face every now and then to free up whatever rock will be needed - or is the formation such that it is easily broken up just using mechanical means and equipment?

It's a Sandstone formation, it's relatively soft compared to other stones, all layers are cracked. Even in the drill samples at 40m depth it's fractured, so i hope we will always be able to work with Rippers on the equipments.
will post some pics of the layers.
My geologist explained me that they are pushed up layers from when the tectonic plaques crashed together, it's not Volcanic. It's any easy meal for the crushers

 
They are making 2 different 1.5" gravels now, the gray one is pure stone (without plasticity) and the brown one has all the fine dirt and clay. then they mix them together 4 to 1 and it goes to the construction site.

[realzed]

Nice and easy production site then.. Thanks!  
Around here as I said, the rock is extremely hard and difficult to crush, so much so that it will wear away plates and cones very quickly. But that also makes it very durable and useful for adding into concrete for high strength mixtures.  
I would imagine in your case - there is little need for a jaw crusher except for very large pieces then, and instead cones are all that is necessary, which makes it even cheaper to produce (but they also make the most fines and dust as a downside as it sounds like you already know :)..
The biggest cost is always the drilling and blasting in a quarry especially in this area of Canada - so your situation in comparison is a great one for reasonably lower cost operation and good return on investment - along with lower maintenance costs for crusher and equipment repair and down time..

[Resonator]

When I was hauling on road building jobs, the stuff with clay mixed in we referred to as "Base". The clay acts as a binder to hold in together, so it packs down tight and makes a good road base. 

[teakwood]

there is little need for a jaw crusher except for very large pieces then, and instead cones are all that is necessary,

that's not the case, the jaw is crucial, there are stones popping up the size of a quad cicle. As we go deeper we get a lot harder and purer layers. the stone qualifies for concrete aggregate, but it has to be the purest of the stones i have, they are light blueish color, meanwhile the brown and gray stones are softer.
But the crushers gets less abused as compared to harder stones and so the costs are lower.

 

[teakwood]

When I was hauling on road building jobs, the stuff with clay mixed in we referred to as "Base". The clay acts as a binder to hold in together, so it packs down tight and makes a good road base.

that's exactly what we do here, we produce base 1.5" and subbase 3" for roadbuilding and refills where buildings will be built.

[teakwood]

it's crazy now, they work from 6am -9pm. 3 weeks left in dryseason, maybe.
80 truckloads a day, brought in a 966 just for truck loading, the 988 stays feeding the crusher.







here are some pics of the stones popping out



there is one weird area where the stones are all loose and come falling down the slope

[MikeV]

Yes, that is a very different-looking formation. Interesting. Please keep the updates and pictures coming if you can.👍

[nativewolf]

Congrats.  Every truck another $.  Much deserved.  She's only got to put up with it 3 more weeks assuming road work slows dramatically in the wet season.  Certainly the dust will drop.

[teakwood]

Well the project will last 18 month but the earth moving firm wants to be done within the next two month. So they go nuts now, because when it starts raining the work will slow down considerably. The now dust will turn into mud, a whole different mess. The crushers don't work well with wet material either.
The dozer operator made me a nice terrace,  where my excavator is standing, really nice and experienced employees

4th Sunday in a row, doesn't matter

The D9 is getting a good workout

We are getting into good quality stone layers

Almost done with the opening around the jaw crusher so the loader can run circles around the feed hopper

[barbender]

Crushing in the rain sucks👎

[Don P]

Is that different loose area an old creek bed? I was looking at something kind of similar here and realized that s what I was looking at. The modern creek was well below and running differently than the old one had. 

The one picture of the face with round softball pockets reminds me of another quarry out west, we picked out and sawed the round core rocks and there were agate formations inside.

[reride82]

If you weren't in Costa Rica I'd almost guess that was glacial till with the variety of sizes. Up in the cold and bitter North we'll get everything from a fine sand(almost similar to flour) all the way up to boulders bigger than a car in the same deposit and everything is well rounded in shape. Old stream beds tend to have aggregate similar in size unless it was prone to huge flooding. You can almost guess the hydraulic gradient of the stream by the size of the aggregate deposited since faster and harder flowing water deposits larger rock compared to smaller rocks on a slower and flatter gradient. That is a great asset to have teakwood!

Levi

[realzed]

I'm really surprised that they don't use hydraulic 'pluggers' or hammers mounted on excavators in your pit situation verses trying to rip everything up with bars on dozers..
Even up here in the hard rock quarries we have - pluggers work quite well when the rocks show any amount of fracturing - especially to break up larger chunks of rock and where any dozer even as big as what are shown, certainly wouldn't ever work!!

[teakwood]

by a plugger you mean like a hydraulic hammer but with a elephant foot? a chisel without a point
that could work.
The dozer still gets into the material pretty good with the ripper, it's just ripping is a mind game, if it doesn't works you change angles, try from a different direction and voila, the material gives 

[realzed]

I'm no good at posting pictures on this site but..

Hydraulic Breakers for Excavators | Jack Hammers | Epiroc US

I hope this opens and displays what I meant.  
This type of attachment works very well even in pits and quarries in our very hard rock here in Northern Ontario,
You could even mount one on your own excavator to process material going forward after your contractor is over and done in your pit..

[teakwood]

a hydraulic hammer is definitively way too slow if you need to break out material for processing and too expensive. when you get to the point where it can't be ripped out anymore then the explosives is the next step.

the cut gets bigger and bigger



did a small clear cut (25 gorgeous teaktrees, 18 years old) so the dozer can clear more overburden



the dozer made me a nice skid road starting at the top of the clearcut. that will be the shortest skid i will ever have, about 500m to get to the sawmill

[Firewoodjoe]

So in time your teakwood will be all cut and it will be all open pit? Your juts selling the material right?  There making ground. 

[teakwood]

No, the quarry area is only 4.5ha, which still has some 2.5ha of teaktrees standing on it, will cut as we advance. the whole finca is 48ha and the planted area is 37ha. so i have alot more teak area than quarry. if the quarry ever gets near his end i can extend the area of the quarry to the next hill. (more permits involved), but i don't think that i will need to do that. still have like 1.2 million m3 of estimated reserves left, i sell like 30-50k m3 a year. 

[thecfarm]

Looks like quite the operation.

[realzed]

If you think a plugger on a decent sized machine would be too slow - possibly and if actually you have watched one used by a decent and experienced operator on a quarry face, especially in a situation or setting like yours is as pictured - I'm left thinking you didn't pick much of an operator or setup to judge one by..
But 'whatever' - as the saying goes these days! 
When here, one of these units can be a blessing in a hard rock quarry - its extremely hard to imagine just how fast and easy a good operator would attack a face like what your pictures and descriptions say and show, about the material you are dealing with - but..!  

[Southside]

I would suspect that it's a lot cheaper per ton to blast the material that it would be to hammer it apart. 

[realzed]

I would suspect that it's a lot cheaper per ton to blast the material that it would be to hammer it apart.

But he did say that it was so soft and fractured that blasting wasn't necessary, and intimated that it was too expensive doing so - so if a dozer with a bar can pull it apart with some effort - I'm sure that a decent sized plugger on any reasonably sized excavator with a seasoned operator could not only knock of a large portion of a quarry face quickly, but also do it much deeper and better than multiple passes a couple of feet deep at best with a dozer and bar..
Not only that, a plugger can break up many of the boulders he claims are often embedded within the structure itself - saving a lot of time and effort jaw crushing many of them as well - which is mainly the reason they are used so much around here in the hard rock quarries.
I mean if a plugger is extremely useful in breaking up large chunks of very hard rock sometimes the size of small cars, blasted off of a quarry face here to make manageable pieces that can be more easily fed in a crusher - I'm certain it could easily and quickly handle anything that little quarry with basically just a compacted sedimentary type of rock structure, can offer - and 20 or 30 feet up and down a quarry face in the process!