platinum
29
06.13
The rope reelers ‘feeding’ rope to the friction winch (photo: Arthur Tassell).
while the 59 mm tail ropes are compact strand non-
spin ropes and have been supplied locally by Haggie
Rand. Engelbrecht points out that the decision to go
with the full lock coil design was based on the long
life that ropes of this type can achieve on friction
winders – an average of 250 000 cycles and more be-
fore discard.
The roping-up procedure is shown in the drawings
accompanying this article and took place between 21
April and 20 May. The operation was managed by
RSV, which deployed eight engineers. The RSV team
worked in collaboration with a very competent mine
team of engineers, artisans and labour and the pro-
cess was highly successful. Said Engelbrecht: “There
has been great interest in the roping-up and we’ve
hosted numerous visits to the site as the operation
has unfolded – including from the RSV team on the
Oyu Tolgoi project in Mongolia, who will be under-
taking a similar procedure in about 18 months’ time.”
No 16 Shaft is one of several new shafts being
brought into operation by Impala (the others include
No 20 Shaft and No 17 Shaft) which are designed to
replace some of the older shafts. No 20 Shaft has al-
ready been commissioned and, like No 16 Shaft, will
reach steady-state production in FY2018 while No 17
Shaft is still in the sinking phase and is only sched-
uled to come on line in 2017, with steady-state pro-
duction being achieved in FY2020.
Photos courtesy of RSV unless otherwise acknowledged
Editor’s note: While this article is primarily based on
Mod-
ern Mining’s
visit to the No 16 Shaft site and discussions
with Torra Engelbrecht, it should be acknowledged that
some of the information has been derived from a paper
on No 16 Shaft presented by Socrates Vakalis of RSV and
Wendy Naysmith of FLSmidth at the Hoist and Haul 2010
conference in the US.
