Bucket engineered for underground repairs.

A Sudbury mining supplier plans to unveil a new LHD (Load Haul Dump) bucket at an international mining show in Las Vegas later this month.

Carriere Industrial Supply's R1300 Reduced Weight Mechanical bucket, also known as an ejector bucket, will be on display at MINExpo 2004. Held every four years in Nevada, the Sept. 27 to 30 event is the biggest mining show in the world.

Mark Andrews, Carriere's general sales manager, says a plate inside the ejector bucket is powered by cylinders that push out muck, negating the need to have height to dump the bucket's contents into a truck.

The specially engineered bucket is geared toward mines with limited headroom.

Unlike conventionally designed buckets that are welded, Carriere's heavy-duty buckets are bolted together.

"We change the parts that wear out," allowing operators to take the buckets apart underground, replace the worn components and put them back to work, says Andrews.

A bolt-on bucket can be completely refurbished within four to six hours and be back at the face, he says.

Normally, it would take about eight hours to pull a conventional bucket off a machine and haul it to surface to be rebuilt.

Originally designed in 1996 and field tested at Inco's Coleman Mine, the bolt-on buckets range from 60 to more than 100 inches across and cost between $30,000 and $60,000.

The 75-employee company has sold about 55 bolt-on buckets to Inco and Falcon-bridge mines in Sudbury and Timmins. The company has one bucket undergoing trials at the Ekati diamond mine in the Northwest Territories.

Located in the Walden Industrial Park, Carriere Industrial Supply designs, manufactures and rebuilds heavy equipment buckets for the mining industry. The company recently built a 4,500-square-foot expansion to its plant and acquired a 50-tonne overhead crane.

www.steelwear.com

By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business