The outcome has been a rethink of the company’s future direction, staff reductions and a refocusing on what managing director, Garry Marsden, calls the “base” businesses. These include engineered systems, bulk material handling conveyors, shiploading, quarries, hard-rock mining, overland conveyors, component business and conveyor structures. Up to 45% of the company’s business is in servicing the coal industry.

In an attempt to return the restructured company to profitability, greater selectivity will also be exercised towards large project-type contracts, according to Marsden.

As one of a few companies capable of providing a full conveyor package from design to commissioning, Continental fitted the last eight major coal mines developed in Australia with its conveyors, he said. In the future, an important growth area for the company would be the maintenance/refurbishment side of the business which was currently being expanded.

Queensland regional manager, Graham Lindner, said roller refurbishment was a growth area for the company. He said the Mackay office recently won the tender to refurbish rollers for the Kestrel mine. Turnover of refurbished rollers was expected to be about 100m of rollers a week for Kestrel, Lindner said.

Marsden said one important advantage for customers was that as part of a global company Continental could feed its customers into global technologies. The use of hollow shafts to make the rollers lighter for conveyors at Port Waratah in New South Wales, for example, was adopted from South Africa.

An exciting new offering, first developed for the Twentymile mine in the US, is Continental’s innovative Scissorveyor, which was shown to the Australian industry at the QME show in Mackay in July. Since the original installation at Twentymile, Continental has built a further eight units in belt sizes of 1400-1800mm.

The Scissorveyor is installed at the tail end of a conveyor, immediately adjacent to the longwall. During idle shifts it is extended and then collapsed during production shifts, thus allowing the longwall to retreat without stopping to remove rigid conveyor structure. Continental says the Scissorveyor eliminates the costly need to remove rigid structure during production shifts.

“Several longwall mining companies have already visited the plant to view the system and have shown quite a bit of interest in the concept and design. They have also had input into the design,” Marsden said. “But I think a lot of mining companies are not being quite as experimental as they used to be. They are more inclined to wait and see what others do before they jump in.”

Lindner said a Queensland mine was currently considering the Scissorveyor as an option in a conveyor package. Bowen Basin mine Moranbah North will be the first Australian mine to implement the Scissorveyor. The mine was seeking alternatives to reduce the amount of manual handling of conveyor structure during longwall advance which creates potential for injury and requires the conveyor to be shut down, impacting on productivity. The Scissorveyor concept seemed to offer the best solution, though a number of changes were required to suit Australian conditions.

Continental engineering manager, Gordon Butler, said a steel rail alternative had to be developed to replace the aluminum roof hung monorails which supported the Scissorveyor.

“Considerable design input was required to develop rails capable of supporting the required loads without exceeding reasonable masses for man handling,” Butler said. “The tractive effort for moving the Scissorveyor tail-piece was previously supplied by the winches. For the Australian design this has been replaced by a compressed air powered mule unit.”

Marsden is bullish about the future, saying that even if growth in longwall mines was stagnant, all underground coals mines needed conveyors.

* This article originally appeared in the September 2000 edition of Australia's Longwalls.