How do you manage large lumps in the Hoppers? What tooling or equipment do you use to break up the lumps?

• We have two giant rollers in the crusher that have liquid voith couplings, so we can reverse jams and that usually frees up any blockade, we also have a modified backhoe / sledge hammer that we can perform energy isolation and have a plant operator chisel the lump out which doesn’t happen very often.

On another asset they had something they called a grizzly….just a giant screen, they would just get a backhoe in the to crush up the blockage.

• we use a steel probe that is attached to the track hoe with steel slings

• Generally, large lumps in the hopper are best managed by having a grated structure over top of the hopper where ore can flow through.  When the probability of delivery of lumps to the hopper is high, build a perch on one side of the hopper and station, a 45 ton excavator, equipped with digging teeth to remove the lump from the top of the grated structure, pull it to the side and on the ground and break the lump into pieces and put it back in the hopper.   Your business will benefit by not having the lumps land on the apron feeder and ultimately jam up the crusher.

• We either blast with 1 or 2 pound shaped charges or if accessible us a rock breaker

•  Oversized Material Management

Operators must be aware of what size of material is acceptable for feeding into the hopper (current configuration allows material no larger than 3M).  The following measures will be followed to prevent oversize material from being dumped into the hopper:

Continually work ore face with the loading unit to break up oversize material that is acceptable for normal feed.  Normally, this process will be done while the loading unit is waiting for trucks.

Sort through the material being loaded and separate out any oversize material. Oversize material to be loaded out at select times and taken to a separate location for future feed (lump dump).

If any oversize material is spotted on a haul truck by ANY Person, they will immediately contact the Haul Truck Operator and inform them of the oversize material. The Haul Truck Operator will immediately contact the area Supervisor to be reassigned to a specified location (lump dump) instead of the OPP dump pocket.