Heavy engineering specialist DavyMarkham has secured an impressive contract worth more than £10m to supply drum hoists to a Canadian gold producer.
The Sheffield based company, which fabricates and supplies complex engineered components, has a strong track record in delivering drum hoists to mines across the globe and the contract will see the hoists operating at the Goldcorp Éléonore Project in northern Quebec.
DavyMarkham will supply two double-drum hoists between 2012 and 2014, one production hoist used to sink the shaft and a second service hoist which will service the mine’s main operations – to extract Éléonore’s significant gold resources.
Gordon Scott, sales and marketing director at DavyMarkham, said: “The contract for Goldcorp Éléonore Project builds on our experience within the mining market, which is opening up more export opportunities within the Americas and other continents as explorations yield undiscovered mineral resources.
The contract follows our previous work with Goldcorp Éléonore Project to supply a first set of drum hoists on a slightly smaller scale.
There are few companies with DavyMarkham’s ability to service large contracts of this kind and the safety margins for drum hoists are narrow due to the stresses that their workload consistently applies.
This means that most large mining companies seek out businesses with a strong track record to supply components such as these.”
The contract builds on DavyMarkham’s previous supply to Goldcorp Éléonore Project of a 12 feet diameter double drum production hoist with geared twin motor drive and two 8 feet diameter single drum auxiliary hoists with geared single motor drives including the design, manufacture, fabrication and trial assembly.
Éléonore’s new production hoist measures 20ft and 6in in diameter and is capable of hoisting to a depth of 2,330m with a twin-skip payload of 21t and a rope speed of 15m per second.
The service hoist, which measures 18 feet in diameter, will operate to a depth of 2,330m carrying a single cage payload of 10t supported on twin ropes and a rope speed of 9m per second.
The electrical drive equipment is subcontracted by DavyMarkham to ABB Montreal which is supplying the 6.3MW direct drive motors, converters, and control systems.
Éléonore is a relatively new project situated close to James Bay in the far north of Quebec and the Éléonore deposit, discovered in 2003, lies at a depth of at least 1,400m and is nearly 1.5km long.
Canada is the world’s largest exporter of minerals and metals and one of the largest producers of gold. There are more than 250 mining exploration projects in the north of the Quebec province and dozens of active mines.