Published in the September 2006 Mining Monthly
The company is an agent for Daeyang rollers and has just added the Newcastle, Adelaide and Townsville distributorships of South African belt cleaning specialist Brelko.
In August, Minspec, based in the industrial suburb of Western Australia’s capital Perth, also became the WA agent for Air Control Sciences’ Total Dustless Transfer system.
Those recent developments track well with Minspec’s history. The company was a rubber products supplier, which meant it had a fair bit to do with conveyors. However, six years ago Minspec’s owners decided to broaden the company’s business, taking it further into materials handling and mineral processing.
The company’s mining consumable division supplies the Minspec brand of abrasion resistant rubber, adhesive systems for both hot and cold rubber lining. Other products include dust cloth, grip strip, capping rubber, rubber screen cloths and many other peripheral components for screening and conveying.
Minspec director Mel King is excited about the possibilities presented by the Air Control Sciences agencies. He forsees big things from the alliance.
“Hopefully the Air Control Sciences deal will become a large part of our business,” he said. “That is going to be huge, I think.”
Brelko is also providing some good opportunities for Minspec. “There is a growing demand for Brelko products, hence the greater distributorships we’ve been awarded,” King said.
To boost its Brelko efforts, Minspec added Bruce Lumsden has its national sales manager for the South African brand. King said Brelko had always been a key product but admitted the company’s focus on it had slipped a little as it focused on building up its own business. “But now we’re putting a lot of effort into Brelko. We keep a good stock of the products here.”
One big advantage with the Daeyang rollers is that they are interchangeable with several other major conveyor roller brands. “If for example you have Prok rollers, you can put ours in easily,” King said.
Business has also been growing for Minspec’s Daeyang distributorship. It distributes carry roller, impact roller, steel and rubber return sets. “The rollers are really starting to take off. We’re starting to get a lot of them into the market,” King said.
The Daeyang rollers also come in a new range of high density polyethylene (HDPE) rollers. HDPE has two key attributes – it is both strong and light. Being much lighter than their steel counterparts, the HDPE rollers are easier to fit, particularly in tight, hard-to-access spaces. They also resist corrosion better than their steel counterparts. “We have both polyethylene and stainless steel shafts for the rollers,” King said.
Indeed, this interchangeablity is something that applies to a number of Minspec products.
Besides supplying conveyor parts, Minspec has also taken a hand in designing and building some conveying systems.
“We’ve just built a ball sorting plant for PT Newmont,” King said. “It sorts the mill balls and takes out the smaller and broken bits.
“Basically anything to do with materials handling, we manage. We’ve just supplied a large order of rollers and frames to Aztec Resources for its Koolan Island project.
“We’ve also supplied a lot of Brelko equipment such as primary scrapers, V ploughs and impact beds to Koolan Island.”
However, while things are growing strongly in the conveyor area, Minspec’s core business is the design and manufacture of a range of screens and feeders. Indeed, it was the development of this side of the business that brought King to the business.
“When I joined Minspec in 2000, it was just a rubber company doing various rubber products,” King said.
“I joined to broaden the product base, which ended up including equipment and spares. My brief was to also get us to design and manufacture our own range of screens and feeders. That’s the core of the business and we’ve built the other mineral processing and materials handling parts around that.”
The screens and feeders side of the business has been going strong, according to King. “We’ve been very successful in vibrating screens and feeders,” he said.
One of the big things for Minspec has been the first sale of the Trio range of crushers to Como Engineering. That machine, a jawcrusher with a throughput of up to 300 tonnes per hour, will be installed next March.
King said the Trio crushers were made in China but based on US technology. “The benefit of these Trio machines, especially the cone crushers, is that a lot of the parts are interchangeable with other crushers. It means it’s easier to get spare parts.
“These machines are starting to get very big in Europe and, of course, China. Another benefit is they can be set up on a portable, fully-balanced assembly. It makes it easier to be used on mobile equipment.”
Minspec has been distributing the Trio range for nine months.
Besides its growing range of services, however, Minspec plans to use its customer service to carve a bigger niche.
“The biggest thing we pride ourselves on is our response time to customer enquiries. We do all of the estimating and equipment selection in-house,” King said.
