Mining
The Sino Iron mine pit is over 2.6sq km in area and will triple in size over the life of the project. We extract the magnetite ore using traditional open pit mining techniques – we drill and blast, then use our excavators to load the ore onto our haul trucks, which take the rock to our four in-pit crushers.
Our drilling systems
We have two types of drills at Sino Iron, the SKF15 and the Pit Viper 351.
The SKF fleet are ‘down-the-hole’, or ‘DTH’ drills, which means they have a hammer on the bottom of the drill that’s used to slowly smash through the rock until the desired hole depth is reached.
The PV351s are rotary drills – they use up to 120,000 pounds of pull-down force while the drill bit rotates, with the downward pressure slowly chipping away the rock.
The SKF fleet are ‘down-the-hole’, or ‘DTH’ drills, which means they have a hammer on the bottom of the drill that’s used to slowly smash through the rock until the desired hole depth is reached.
The PV351s are rotary drills – they use up to 120,000 pounds of pull-down force while the drill bit rotates, with the downward pressure slowly chipping away the rock.
Maintaining our fleet
Supporting our mining operation is a large Heavy Mobile Equipment (HME) Workshop, which has capacity to fit seven of the MT6300 trucks inside and has a 50 tonne overhead crane.
Our haul truck fleet
We use diesel electric MT6300 haul trucks for carting the iron ore from the pit to the crushers – this is an off-road truck engineered for high-production mining and heavy-duty construction environments.
At nearly 10m long and 8m high, these trucks weigh 270 tonnes when empty and have 3,750 horsepower - each truck can haul around 360 tonnes at a time.
At nearly 10m long and 8m high, these trucks weigh 270 tonnes when empty and have 3,750 horsepower - each truck can haul around 360 tonnes at a time.
Our mining equipment
Sino Iron operates on an enormous scale, and we work with some of the largest mining equipment in Australia.
Our biggest excavators are the RH400 and CAT 6090, the largest hydraulic face shovels in the world, weighing close to 1,000 tonnes and with a loading capacity of 4,500 tonnes of ore per hour.
We have a large, skilled team operating a range of mobile plant equipment including the Pit Viper 351, SKF15 Drills and the RH170, RH340 and CAT 6090/RH400 shovels; as well as our diesel electric haul trucks, wheel loaders, graders and track dozers – to name a few.
Our biggest excavators are the RH400 and CAT 6090, the largest hydraulic face shovels in the world, weighing close to 1,000 tonnes and with a loading capacity of 4,500 tonnes of ore per hour.
We have a large, skilled team operating a range of mobile plant equipment including the Pit Viper 351, SKF15 Drills and the RH170, RH340 and CAT 6090/RH400 shovels; as well as our diesel electric haul trucks, wheel loaders, graders and track dozers – to name a few.
Facts and Figures
- Sino Iron has some of the world's largest excavators and haul trucks:
- The largest haul truck weighs approximately 270 tonnes, has a 3,750 horsepower engine and can haul up to 360 tonnes at a time.
- Four in-pit crushers from Germany with design capacity to crush 4,250 tonnes of ore per hour per unit.
- The conveyor carrying crushed ore from the mine to the concentrator area is about 1.7km long.
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