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Sizzling heat during the day, icy cold at night – these were the harsh weather conditions awaiting a four-person Tadano team and a CC 38.650-1 lattice boom crawler crane at the Cerro Verde copper mine in Peru. The plan was for Peruvian crane service provider San Lorenzo’s brand new crane to set up a 247-tonne section of a conveyor belt that would be used to move gravel and rocks from the bottom of the mine upwards. The Tadano team took care of setting up, commissioning, and handing over the crane, as well as of training the San Lorenzo team in how to operate their new CC 38.650-1.
“The reason we decided on the extremely versatile CC 38.650-1 for this grueling job was the fact that it’s an incredibly powerful and rugged machine that can handle the kind of conditions you find at this type of mine day in, day out. Those conditions entail a lot of wear, so it was good to have the Peruvian TÜV office confirm it by approving the Tadano CC 38.650-1 for unlimited use at all mines in South America. And then, of course, you have the fact that the crane’s design is cleverly and systematically optimized for transportation, so it was relatively easy to bring the unit to what ultimately was a work site that is normally difficult to access,” explains Tadano Technical Training instructor Sönke Eichhorn, who traveled all the way from Zweibrücken for the job.
His mission, as well as that of his Tadano co-workers Domagoj Bozic, Jair Solís, and Leandro Henrique Ribeiro Oliveira, was to ensure that the crane would be fully set up at the mine with an SSL_1 configuration including an 84-meter main boom, Vario-SL system, ramshorn hook block, 225 tonnes of counterweight, and 245 tonnes of Superlift counterweight within six weeks. “As we all know, setting up the CC 38.650-1 usually takes just a few days. However, we used the job as an opportunity to set up the crane together with the customer’s personnel – the first time they’d be doing it, in fact – and provide training for the San Lorenzo team and our employees throughout the whole process,” Sönke Eichhorn says when explaining why the setup time was so unusually long.
Health check and safety briefing for the team
Before all that could happen, however, the crane had to be shipped from Germany to Peru. Once at the Port of Callao in Lima, it was taken to San Lorenzo’s premises in Arequipa first, and from there resumed its journey with a total of 28 trucks to the Cerro Verde mine at an altitude of 2700 meters. Unlike the crane though, the Tadano team first had a layover at the hospital operated by the Cerro Verde mine operator. “We had to have a medical examination there just to make sure that we were healthy and in good enough physical shape for the strenuous work that awaited us in that harsh environment,” Sönke Eichhorn reports. Once everyone had been cleared, the team was briefed on the various work, health and safety rules for the mine at the Cerro Verde training center. “The work there is obviously not without its dangers, so the rules were pretty strict,” explains Sönke Eichhorn, who found the work site to be extremely loud, dusty, and harsh in general – a real test of strength for man and machine, he adds.
Smooth setup
Despite the adverse surroundings, the team was able to set up the crane for the first time on schedule while providing all the planned training, so that the assembly process for the conveyor belt was able to start as expected. A Tadano AC 5.220-1 was deployed as an auxiliary crane to assist in the assembly of the CC 38.650-1. It had been driven to the mine all by its own and that was able to handle the extreme conditions on site just as well as the crawler crane. Once fully assembled, the CC 38.650-1 placed the first 80-meter-long, 247-tonne section of the conveyor belt on two previously erected supports. The procedure will be repeated numerous times until the conveyor belt has been fully assembled with its complete length of 900 meters and reached the bottom of the mine.
Effusive words of praise for Tadano
Although the Tadano team has been back home for quite a while now, the CC 38.650-1 will be staying at the mine for another five years. “We have more than enough work for it,” assures San Lorenzo Service Manager Victor Condori, who had effusive words of praise for the Tadano instructor team: “We’re tremendously grateful that Sönke and his colleagues went all in to help us set up the CC 38.650-1 for the first time ever despite the tough conditions at our mine. We worked together incredibly smoothly, and to tell you the truth, the training they provided was simply perfect,” he says on behalf the entire San Lorenzo team.
