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COVER STORY
16
MODERN MINING
June 2016
S
leipner Finland was founded in
1997 by an excavator operator, Ossi
Kortesalmi, who was then working
at a chrome mine in the Finnish
Artic. Troubled by the loss of pro-
ductivity involved in moving tracked excava-
tors around site, he came up with the simple
– yet revolutionary – idea of giving tracked
machines a set of wheels through the use of a
dolly system. The beauty of the system is that
the very truck that is being loaded by an exca-
vator can then be used to tow the excavator to
a new site.
The process of putting the excavator on
wheels takes just minutes. The machine is first
reversed onto the dolly so that the rear of the
undercarriage is off the ground. The bucket
of the excavator is then placed in the bed of
the truck and the machine is lifted using its
own hydraulics. The whole assemblage effec-
tively becomes a wheeled truck-and-trailer
combination which can move at speeds of up
to 15 km/h. Once the excavator arrives at its
new work site, the process is simply reversed
and the machine can be operational within a
few minutes.
“The Sleipner system is so simple that one
almost wonders why it took so long for anyone
to come up with the idea,” says Hollins. “The
benefits, of course, are huge. On most mines,
excavators can spend up to 15 % of their time
travelling. With Sleipner, travel time can be
reduced by as much as 85 % – which trans-
lates into huge productivity gains. Moreover,
use of the system typically doubles, or even
triples, undercarriage life, which means that
maintenance costs and service downtime are
The movement of heavy tracked mining equipment – such
as excavators and shovels, drill rigs and bulldozers – around
mine sites, or even from one mine site to another, is typi-
cally an expensive and time consuming operation which
can impact severely on production. But this need not be
the case. Transport solutions developed by Sleipner Finland
and available locally through JCR Equipment, trading as
Sleipner Africa, address the problem in a highly effective
way, offering dramatic time savings that can significantly
increase productivity and reduce machine wear.
Modern
Mining
recently spoke to Sleipner Africa’s MD, Rory Hollins,
to learn more about Sleipner’s ingenious systems.
The DB120 system can
transport the world’s biggest
bulldozers such as the D475
seen here.
Sleipner provides mine site