Charlotte Mathews
2 July 2008
Johannesburg — MINING services company VR Steel is testing and refining a new truck body at Sishen Mine, which it hopes will put it in a good position to bid for a multimillion-rand contract at the Northern Cape mine in the next couple of years.
Sishen, a Northern Cape iron-ore mine more than 50 years old, is due to replace its truck bodies in the next couple of years. The mine has a fleet of 44 heavy-duty trucks, used to transport iron ore from pit to processor. Each truck body costs up to R2,5m. Truck bodies have a life of only four to six years.
VR Steel has also tendered to supply nine truck bodies at the new mine Kumba Iron Ore is developing at Sishen South.
VR Steel founder and MD John van Reenen said this week little work on truck body design had been done by the original equipment manufacturers, which had tended to focus their research and development on the trucks' other mechanical parts. VR Steel spends about R12m a year on research and development, including on its truck body design.
VR Steel's truck body prototypes being tested at Sishen were more expensive than the others in the market.
But in collaboration with Anglo American and Kumba Iron Ore, the company was working to make its truck bodies lighter and more streamlined. By reducing the weight of the truck body to 34 tons at present from 42 originally, and with a target of 30 tons, VR Steel's design would enable the trucks to carry more ore and unload faster, which would improve productivity at the mine, Van Reenen said.
The typical hourly life cycle cost of the VR Steel truck bodies, as demonstrated in their first 2700 hours at the mine, was US50c , compared with an average of about $1/hour elsewhere, and even $10/hour at some of the Minnesota iron-ore mines, he said.
Although VR Steel has been making dragline buckets, which have been used in opencast coal mining since 2004, this was its first move into truck bodies.
Van Reenen said that if it proved a resilient design at Sishen it would be in a good position to bid for contracts at other iron-ore mines elsewhere in the world.
Truck bodies that could handle extremely abrasive iron ore could also be used in a wide range of other mining activities.
VR Steel sells its South African-made steel products in SA, Australia, Brazil, India and the US. It recently formed a subsidiary in China, where it intends to manufacture products for the Asian markets. It has an annual turnover of more than R350m and employs 230 people.
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