You’re on-site, and everything seems to be running smoothly. But suddenly, a piece of machinery malfunctions, and your operation comes to a screeching halt. Your maintenance team determines what’s wrong, but no one is sure if you have what you need on hand. The material handling parts storage isn’t organized, and no one has cleaned it out in ages, so while your team is looking for what they need, they are bombarded with non-critical parts that shouldn’t be in storage anyway.

At Kemper Equipment, we know how easy it is to let your storage space get disorganized because you’ve decided more parts are critical than they are. We have experience with all kinds of parts and can help you determine what components are genuinely essential to your operation. Whether during our on-site services while we troubleshoot your machinery or during regular operating hours, we want to share that information with you so you can better prepare for a potential malfunction.

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The transfer and transport of rock is what sets efficient, profitable quarries apart from those that are not. When you move rock from the source point to its final destination, it takes manpower and machinery to do so quickly and effectively; and without either, significant delays in the processing and production of aggregate may occur.

The method of transportation will depend upon the exact type of raw material (in this case, rock) and the weight or amount you need to move. Other factors include the location of your quarry—is it near rails, roads, or water. The source location may limit or provide additional forms of transportation. Specific types of rock may also require special consideration when moving, such as slate due to the risk of cracks and breaks during travel.

Common types of rock include:
• Chalk
• Clay
• Coal
• Sand and gravel aggregate
• Granite
• Gritstone
• Gypsum
• Limestone
• Marble
• Ores
• Sandstone
• Slate

Getting rock from point A to point B requires a system designed to expedite the process and make loading and unloading manageable. This is why conveyor systems are essential in mines, quarries, and any location where raw material is excavated.

The conveyor system

If your mined rock isn’t remaining at the quarry, you’ll need to get it from there to its final destination. Conveyor systems allow companies to move rock from mines, quarries, and other source locations to where they’ll be stored or processed further.

Once you decide how you will be transporting your rock, whether by rail, water, or truck, you’ll need an appropriate conveyor system to transfer the aggregate onto its transport. The type of system again depends on the type, quantity, and weight of the rock. There are several types of conveyor systems available to make the task easier.

Radial stacker: A cost-effective solution that lets you create stockpiles of rock or fine aggregate to reduce processing time. Radial stackers can load large trucks or cars with material with ease.

Overland conveyor: Capable of transferring up to 15,000 tons an hour, overland conveyors move rock above ground over long distances, across flat terrain or up and down hills. This system is ideal for moving a large quantity of rock to be processed or to its transport.

Railcar loading/unloading conveyor: These conveyors rely on vacuum or pressure systems to continuously load and transfer raw material. The railcar conveyor is ideal for maintaining a constant flow of rock, at high rates, and over long distances. This can be an incredibly convenient and efficient means of moving rock if your quarry has access to a rail.

Barge loading/unloading conveyor: This conveyor system is necessary if you’re using boats and freights to transport rock. Like the railcar system, this conveyor moves raw material to and from boats with ease. They can be combined with overland and stockpiling conveyors, too, to reduce heavy-equipment fuel charges while also achieving the highest stockpiling height possible.

Moving rock by truck

Trucks are perhaps the most common mode of transportation for quarry and construction companies forced to move rock. Trucks are easy to load and are capable of dumping loads at the final destination without assistance. The size and scale of trucks accommodate a range of weight and size requirements, making them a versatile and effective transport. They can move rock anywhere there is a road.

Haul trucks, in particular, are a large type of truck able to move rock between conveyor belts, stockpiles, and even the jaw crusher of a plant.

Depending on their size, make, and model, trucks can haul anywhere from 1,500 lbs. up to around three and a half tons.

Move rock by water

For quarries with access to navigable waterways, rivers become an option for moving rock. Hoppers and flat deck barges can both accommodate rock and other aggregate, with hopper barges capable of holding up to 1,700 tons of raw material.

Rail transport

When quarries are located near train rails, they can make use of rail shipping. Moving rock by rail is often more economical than by truck. This method is ideal for transporting raw material to parts of the country with limited local, natural stone resources or significantly low-quality stone product. When moving rock and aggregate by rail, material can be loaded into 100-ton bottom dump hopper cars, a single car, or in gondolas.

Remember that size of the rock is a variable in deciding how you may want to move your material as slab and aggregate will require different conveyors and forms of transport. How you move your rock from A to B ultimately depends on the scale of your operation. Efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and distance/process time are all factors you’ll want to consider during the decision-making process. Contact us to learn more about Kemper Equipment conveyors

You’ve been working in your industry for a few years now, and so far, you’ve gotten by with your current equipment and felt like that was giving you a good enough product. However, lately, you’ve been thinking about how much more precise your sizing could be if only you had a better understanding of what screening equipment can do and how to introduce it to your production.

The machine handling industry is a diverse place where each machine has a specific job to do. These machines often work together to produce the right product based on size and demand. In a vast market, it’s not always easy to understand each machine’s part in the bigger picture.

If you know what it takes to break material down into sellable products, you already understand that screening equipment is pivotal in that process. If you’ve never used screening equipment, maybe you are finally considering using it for your operation.

For the second part of our Equipment 101 series, we’ll explain how screening equipment works, where it fits into the machine handling process, and how we at Kemper Equipment can help. Read on for everything you need to know about screening equipment.

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While seemingly unassuming, sand is crucial for many industries. The uses and differences between each type of sand are varied. Cement and concrete rely on one variation of sand, while fiberglass uses another kind. Sand is also integral in creating glass products or iron and steel components. It’s understandable to see how much value sand has in society; many industries would suffer without it.

Moving sand easily from an operation to its final destination is imperative to keeping construction companies and other industries supplied with this essential material. While we at Kemper Equipment can help you design and build systems for your sand operations, there’s still the question of how you transport the material from your production facility to a new location as quickly as possible after it’s been processed.

Locating Sand

The first step to moving sand easily is locating it. Many people assume it’s easy to find, but it takes a significant amount of resources to develop deposits capable of producing sand products.

Sand is a very versatile material and is derived from many kinds of rock types, most of which include limestone, feldspar, and silicon dioxide. Producers may find it naturally below and above ground, in glacial deposits, sand dunes, arid environments, and natural lakes, seas, and oceans. After you’ve located the sand deposits, next comes the quarrying.

Quarrying Sand and Gravel Deposits

You may apply most of the tactics used for hard rock quarries to sand and gravel operations. The most significant difference between sand and gravel quarries and everything else is the land use these operations require. Sand and gravel deposits are typically shallow, so naturally, companies have to disturb more land to obtain the same volume of product.

Mining and Dredging: Sand Extraction

Typically, mining for sand comes from sources above ground, such as sand dunes, but operational facilities often dredge it from deep underwater excavations known as pits. Dredges are large structures that float in manmade or natural ponds.

They rely on a continuous chain of buckets or rotary cutting heads to dislodge material from below the water’s surface. The material is displaced and removed using a suction hose and separated from other mineral particles during the process. A dredge is a tool used for excavating the gravel, too.

Move Sand Easily with a Conveyor System

Once a deposit is quarried and mined, you must move it from the source through the rest of your process to its final destination. This endpoint can mean the sale of the sand or its use in construction and industrial products.

Conveyor systems using stationary or overland conveyors, telescopic conveyors, and radial stackers provide operations with a way to move sand across long distances, up and down hills, and onto the transport.

Usually, operations would require wheel loaders to build a stockpile, but conveyors work by moving sand across a conveyor belt and dumping it in stockpiles, making it a cost-effective option for moving sand within your production. Radial stackers move along a radius, efficiently dumping the product into manageable caches.  They remove the need for wheel loaders and reduce diesel, personnel, and maintenance costs in the process.

Conveyor and stacking systems offer customizable designs, from the length and width of the conveyor or stacker itself and belt width to the height of your stockpile and options including power radial wheels, chevron, or vulcanized belts, and hydraulics to extend the conveyor longer for larger stockpile size. A conveyor makes moving sand much more effortless.

For added convenience, conveyors can be designed to your specifications to meet your operational needs and budget. At Kemper Equipment, we can help design and build your system, so you know you are moving your sand product from processing to the end goal as efficiently as possible.

Additionally, whenever one of your conveyors or stacking systems requires repair or maintenance to keep your sand operation on track and moving quickly, don’t hesitate to contact us at Kemper Equipment. We have skilled technicians with the experience and knowledge necessary to help you get your operation up and running again as soon as possible.

How to Transport Sand Effectively

Three of the easiest methods for transporting sand to its final destination are by trucks, rail, or barge. Trucks are relatively simple to use, mainly in loading and dumping. Many trucks are capable of dumping their loads once they arrive at the destination without assistance. Trucks are also available in many sizes and models to satisfy several operational needs, making them a convenient option.

Transporting sand by open-top rail is the second option. For operations near train rails, rail shipment provides an efficient method of moving the raw material, reducing the fuel consumption and some of the spending associated with trucks. The partially automated nature of rail shipping is another benefit companies can appreciate. Custom railcar loading and unloading systems can be used with 100-ton dump hopper cars, gondolas, or single cars, creating a much smoother, continuous flow of material.

Barges are the third form of transport for sand. A typical hopper barge can transport up to 1,700 net tons of sand, roughly the amount it would take 17 rail cars, or 68 trucks, to move. From a logistics standpoint, barges are an excellent solution for moving sand from origination to destination.

The three options each have their own benefits:

• Trucks are convenient and come in a variety of sizes.
• Rail transportation is more economical.
• Barges have a much higher capacity, enabling companies to move more product in fewer trips.

However, they also have their drawbacks:

• Fuel costs are expensive to run trucks back and forth with any regularity.
• Rail transportation is limited to places that have access to rails.
• Similarly, barges are limited in their travel ability based on their water access.

Your selection will depend on the size of your operation and budget, but it will also depend on your location. Sometimes, you may need to use a combination of transportation methods to get your sand to where it belongs. Still, regardless of your choice or needs, sand is an easy raw material to move throughout the entire process when you utilize the proper equipment.

Are You Ready To Move Sand Easily?

When you’re ready to move sand easily, you need the resources to do so effectively. You can efficiently process and transfer your product from your production facility to the final destination with the right equipment. Get in touch with us today if you have questions about your current system and how you can improve your speed and profitability with our systems and equipment recommendations or repairs.

Conveyors are essential to quarrying, mining, and mineral processing operations, but we sometimes take them for granted. Did you know that it was not so long ago in human history that these hardworking machines didn’t exist? Imagine your surface or open-pit mining operation without any conveyors— things would not be moving very quickly or efficiently, and the whole undertaking would be much more dangerous!

To show conveyors a little appreciation, we’re looking at their history from their roots in the late 1700s through decades of improvement and innovation that transformed them into the reliable machines we depend on today.

And if you have any questions about conveyors or how our conveyor systems might benefit your operation after you finish reading this piece, please feel free to reach out to us!

The Earliest Conveyors

If conveyors have a single inventor or first installation site, the passage of time has sadly lost that information. What is known is that while Henry Ford made conveyors famous with his automobile assembly product lines in the early 20^th century, he did not invent them (as many people incorrectly believe). He just improved upon old technology.

Various sources point to 1795 as the year when conveyors first appeared. These early conveyors were short, made from leather belts and wooden beds, and were hand-operated. You would most likely find them in ports to move agricultural products from shore to ship.

Revolutionary Improvements

As the Industrial Revolution took hold in Great Britain during the 18^th century, and then a little later in America, the phasing out of manual labor in many production environments began favoring steam-powered machinery. Steam power was the “hot” new tech at the time!

Less than a decade after the initial creation of conveyor belts, the British Navy put the first steam-operated conveyor into use. The year was 1804, and while you may think this new, machine-driven conveyor would have endured the challenging task of loading ships, it operated in a bakery that produced biscuits for sailors to eat! In any case, this improvement with steam technology meant that conveyors no longer had to be hand-cranked, making them more useful for more applications.

Machine-driven conveyors caught on quickly and began appearing in all sorts of industries, though it would still be almost 100 years before they would work in mining operations. Railcars were still the preferred method of moving aggregate and coal from within mines to surface operations for much of the 1800s. However, this preference began to change as new belt materials like rubber and steel appeared.

New Belt Materials

Some sources report that early conveyor belts used rubber, although this material certainly wasn’t ideal. It was prone to change based on temperature, becoming stiff and rigid in cold environments, or melting and getting sticky in warm temperatures. These problems lasted until 1844 when inventor Charles Goodyear patented vulcanized rubber.

His innovation made rubber a much more stable substance that didn’t react negatively to temperature changes. Eventually however, the mining industry turned to steel conveyor belts. Sandvik was the first manufacturer to produce these belts beginning in 1902.

It wasn’t until a few years later, in 1905, that mining engineer and inventor Richard Sutcliffe would introduce the first underground conveyor belt, made from layered cotton and rubber. At that time, the food production industry widely adopted steel belts. In contrast, rubber-covered belts became the norm in mining, quarrying, and mineral processing due to their superior durability and flexibility.

Rails are Out, and Conveyors are In

With Sutcliffe’s underground conveyor belt, mining and quarrying were revolutionized over the following few decades, as massive quantities of material could now move from the extraction point with much less labor. No longer did expensive rail lines need to be laid and maintained. And when a mine’s LOM (expected life of the mine) was over, a conveyor was much easier to pack up and remove than a rail line, which was pretty much permanent.

However, it did take some good publicity to popularize conveyors, as news of technical innovations didn’t spread as quickly back then as it does today. Plus, it was not as easy to purchase and set up conveyors in the early days as today, where all you need to do is call Kemper Equipment for all your conveyor needs.

In 1908, inventor Hymle Goddard patented the first roller conveyor, and things started moving. Henry Ford famously began using conveyors on the assembly lines in his Ford Motor automobile plants around 1913, and problem-solvers in countless industries began refining conveyors and inventing new types. In the quarrying, mining, and mineral processing industries, conveyors quickly replaced the locomotive and rail lines throughout the 1920s until the outbreak of war in the 1940s.

Conveyors Just Keep Getting Better

Several 20^th-century conveyor innovations have gotten us to where we are today. America’s involvement in World War II slowed mining and quarrying at home. Still, wartime was great for conveyors – the rubber shortage spawned the first synthetic belt materials during this time.

The rapid growth in the post-war American economy in the 1950s spurred even more conveyor improvements. For example, the turnover conveyor belt system was patented in 1957, reducing the costs of running conveyors continuously, thanks to improved belt longevity. Another major conveyor innovation was the invention of the telescopic conveyor in 1992 by Thor.

The Present and the Future: Computerization and Customization

In recent years, computerization has made conveyor belts more reliable and easier to work with in quarrying, mining, and mineral processing operations. Conveyors are now “smart” automated systems and can alert operators to maintenance needs. They can also run, stop, and change speed in response to programmed commands. Computerization has led to more customization of conveyor systems to achieve the exact outcomes mine and quarry operators need.

Indeed, finding the right conveyor for your needs now often involves customizing a system that can efficiently and economically move material from the extraction point to stockpile and beyond, no matter what challenges the mine or quarry site present.

In the future, better machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will likely refine conveyors to reduce maintenance and breakdowns and remove more direct human oversight while work is underway. The result will be increased safety in our mines and quarries, as well as increased efficiency.

Curious about what modern conveyors can do for your operations? Here at Kemper Equipment, we are dedicated to finding the best conveyor systems to revolutionize your mining and quarrying projects. Get in touch with us now to talk about your conveyor equipment requirements and goals.

Maybe you are in the early stages of planning a mineral processing plant, or perhaps you are hoping to expand your current operations to a different location, and you’re going to start fresh. Or, like many others, you are looking into the ever-expanding field of mineral processing as a future career. No matter why you’re curious about mineral processing plants, it’s essential to have access to valuable information about how they operate.

At Kemper Equipment, we have plenty of experience working with mineral processing equipment, and we understand the ins and outs of these sophisticated tools and systems. So, if you’re looking for more information about mineral processing plants, you’ve come to the right place!

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If you are a rock, sand, gravel, or mineral processing industry veteran or an avid reader of our blog, you know that there are several different types and styles of crushing equipment. The exact crushers you need—jaw, cone, impact, or gyratory—will depend on your site, the product you’re making, and how much you need to produce.

An individual crusher’s construction and capabilities also dictate where in your processing operations it will fit. That is, you may have multiple types of crushers situated in primary, secondary, and tertiary stations in a circuit format to perform the necessary material reduction work. Each type of crusher brings unique strengths and benefits to the process.

Today’s post focuses on compression-style jaw crushers, which are most often employed in the primary stage of a crushing circuit. It’s important to know that cone crushers are sometimes used in their place, and we’ll also talk a little bit about when cone crushers may be preferred over jaw crushers.

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Material handling and sorting are enormous jobs that require the right equipment. Screening media exists to help several industries, including the mining industry and washing plants, with sorting, washing, and separating aggregates of all kinds to be appropriately classified and sold at the required size.

Choosing the right screening media for the job at hand can be challenging, and there are pros and cons for each type. At Kemper Equipment, we know it can be frustrating to decide if you’ve never really thought about the different options before or are looking to update your current equipment and aren’t sure where to start.

We want to help you maximize both productivity and profit for your operations, and we have put together this informational piece about rubber screening media so you can make the best decision for your business.

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When you manage quarry equipment, you know that eventually, you will have to either repair or replace something on the machines. This process doesn’t have to be frustrating, as you can plan for what will happen if you do have a breakdown to minimize any potential downtime.

At Kemper Equipment, we have a few tips on how to decide if you should repair or replace your equipment and the considerations you can make before you get to that point to help ease you into the decision.

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As a business, buying mineral processing equipment may be one of the most significant decisions you can make. The topic can come up when you build a new plant or hope to update existing equipment systems to be more productive. Perhaps you have purchased processing equipment in the past, but you want a refresher on what you should be looking for in high-quality machinery.

Regardless of your specific needs, Kemper Equipment can help. We have over three decades of experience helping businesses like yours purchase high-quality equipment for their mineral processing operations.

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