Speed production and cut costs

At an established quarry in South Carolina, Riverbend was taking granite production to a new level that was unattainable by the quarry owner working with its own forces and equipment. There, a new MOBICAT MC 110 Zi EVO primary jaw crusher, a MOBISCREEN MS 15 Z screen, and a MOBICONE MCO 9i EVO secondary cone crusher – all from KLEEMANN – were working together to smooth production and lower costs. “Here we are making crusher run granite road base and a No. 4 material, which is 2 in. by 1 ½ in. with no fines,” Boyd said. The crusher run size is 100% passing 1 ½ in., all the way down to 200 mesh size. Riverbend does the drilling and blasting of the gray granite, and loads and hauls the raw stone to the processing site on the top of the pit.

The equipment is set up in a closed circuit. Material is primary-crushed at the MC 110 Zi EVO, and both crushed material and all fines go to the mobile screen. The MS 15 Z mobile screen has two decks, the top with 2-in. panels, and 1 ½-in. panels on the bottom deck. The top deck overs go to the MCO 9i EVO to be sized down (as the jaw is set to 65 mm, a 4- to 5-in. size rock goes to the cone). The cone crushes that material and sends it back to the screen for resizing. The bottom deck overs are a 2 x 1 ½-in. rock, and the bottom deck screen throughs is a 1 ½ in. size which is stacked as a product. Anything dropping through is crusher run which is stockpiled and loaded onto trucks.

“One great benefit of the KLEEMANN plants is its diesel direct drives,” Boyd said. “The MC 110 Zi EVO and the MCO 9i EVO are diesel over electric,” he said. “The crushers are run off fluid couplings but the rest of the plant is electric. The advantage is that the electrical systems are much easier to work on; any electrician who knows about three-phase electricity can troubleshoot or repair it. That’s unlike competing makes, in which all of the products are hydraulically driven. And when you have hydraulic problems, they are very difficult to troubleshoot.

“We can go in on a daily basis and do a zero-point set on the MCO 9i EVO,” Boyd said. “The cone will screw itself down until it touches, and then back itself off. It’s a super-accurate way of checking your closed-side setting. If you just go in and set it, unless you know where the zero point is, it’s not an accurate measurement. By being able to automatically zero out your cone, you don’t have to use lead weights or crush slugs to measure the lead, in order to see what the setting should be. The automatic setting is fantastic; you push a couple of buttons and it’s set within five minutes. The MOBICAT jaw crusher design also aids maintenance,” Boyd found. Like the MOBICONE, it features fully automatic hydraulic crushing gap adjustment, which guarantees quick setup times and on-the-fly adjustments.

While Riverbend has two other mobile aggregate processing plants of other makes, Boyd chose KLEEMANN after doing research that included visiting KLEEMANN’s plant in Göppingen, Germany. “I visited KLEEMANN’s factory about two years ago, and was fascinated by the design, engineering and fabrication of KLEEMANN equipment,” Boyd said. “The engineering is fantastic. As a result I had to give them a try.” At the same time, he found support for his existing equipment was getting weak. “The support I get from KLEEMANN and Linder Industrial Machinery Co. has been fabulous,” he said. “It’s of excellent quality.”