Are these hammer mills your talking about all made in China or just the engine?... It's amazing what one can find for mining equipment in China. I get contacted by the Chinese manufactures all the time about their mining stuff and inquiry on if We'd be interested in marketing the stuff they have. Some things like their rockdrill bits, I've sold for years now and the performance of them has really improved within the last 10 years or so. Their drill rods, ain't worth a pinch of monkey crap though. One of my customers bought a Chinese single boom hydraulic rock drill jumbo. It lacks a bit in performance over a Swedish unit, but the cost is like $150 grand less then a fine machine from Sweden. I took this pic of it at the face as they wanted me to see why it was eating up so much drill rod. They did have their percussion and rotation setting a little off, but the real issue I thought was the load a Chinese drill rod they bought cheap. I won't sell that stuff, so I got em to run some made in the US and it held up a lot better, but did cost substantially more. I told them to keep track of the usage to feet drilled and see what the real cost is on cheap consumables over the better stuff and that'll really tell you what your spending. I did sell more US made rod, so I think it goes without saying, just because it's cheap doesn't really mean your cutting your overhead. There's so many factors involved with underground mining and you need to be on top of it every step of the way, because if your not, it'll bankrupt your dreams real quick. I've seen it happen to a few small operations over the years. I've seen start-up mines that in a short time come to a close, because they didn't think it would cost as much as was estimated. Not even we were immured to some of those failures, by the money that was never received from products and services rendered.
Boy I bet you can get away with a lot over there. MSHA over here would run out of ink writing up citations if they came across an operation like I see there. No ppe, guards on belts, dead man switches or high vis clothing and what all else you need to have to do the job safely?. I don't think we're allowed to walk and chew gum at the same time around here anymore wile performing even a simple task.
What?... They gonna recruit even more new mine inspectors. Seems here in Colorado there are more msha mine inspectors then we have in active mines now.
Maybe so, as there's bigger fish to fry in the eyes of msha as the big companies pay their citations. In one of my annual refreshers the instructor went down a list of citations and the companies that received them and those who all contested their fines and those who paid without any recourse. Seems those who were not accepting of the fine were mostly smaller mine operations that held up paying the fines by contesting it. The ones that pay were all the big Freport's, Newmonts and the like. Maybe they figured they can't squeeze blood out of a turnip and don't wanna spend the money running down every small time miner writing citations he'll just turn around and contest.
