19 Aug Stone Quarries
Stone quarries are the most ancient of all types of businesses. Stone quarries are mined for various types of rock and stone. Originally, quarries provided massive stone for the building of castles and embattlements to protect towns and villages from invaders. As time passed, people saw the value in building homes and chimneys made from quarry stone and rock.
Quarry Equipment
In the early days of quarries, the work of removing rock from mountain sides or beneath the earth was done by manual labor with simple hand tools and blasting with explosives. Today, quarries use sophisticated industrial equipment to do the job that took hundreds of miners in the past. Some of today’s quarrying equipment includes:
- Strippers
- Drills
- Hydraulic wheel loaders
- Crushers
- Off highway trucks
Surface rock is stripped using a crawler tractor. This equipment is similar to a bulldozer as removes and strips surfaces of rock and separates the specific materials to be extracted. These machines have dual action. The front blades attached remove the dirt and the rear blades rip through the rock.
Blasting has been used in quarries for hundreds of years. Small holes are drilled into the core of rock using augers mounted on platforms. Once the holes are drilled by the augers, the holes are then packed with explosives and detonated.
Hydraulic wheel loaders are equipped with arms to remove up to 35 tons of the dirt removed by crawler tractors. Some hydraulic wheel loaders are also used to load rock trucks with quarried materials.
Crushers, as the name implies, crush quarry stone and rock into various forms. Off highway trucks are one of the most important operatives of quarries. They haul away quarried materials.
One of the largest trucks ever used to haul ores from a quarry was operated in Sparwood, British Columbia. The Terex 33-19 “Titan” has a vehicle net weight of 509,500 lbs and is over 66 feet long, 25 feet high and is over 22 feet in height. The tires on this vehicle are nearly 12 feet tall. It has a payload capacity of 320 tons. Serious payload capacity.
Types of Quarry Stone
There are more than a dozen types of stone and rock excavated from quarries. Quarry stone also has diverse properties and density. Marble and granite are considered the hardest of quarried stones. Clay has water content and was first used for writing tablets. Crushed and powdered limestone is often used as an agricultural nutrient for comprised soil.
Quarry stone generally falls into three categories: Decorative, industrial and agricultural. The most popular decorative quarry stones are slate and marble. Gypsum is often used for various construction products like sheetrock. Industrial stone, like sand, gravel and sandstone are often used in construction. In addition to these quarry stones, there are others, including:
- Chalk
- Diabase
- Cinder
- Granite
- Limestone
- Salt
- Sand
- Ores
- Coquina
- Phosphate rock
With the diverse range of quarry stones, each quarry chooses the specific quarry materials they wish to produce for sales to customers. In the USA and Canada, quarries become expended through decades of mining. Spent quarries are often used as water reservoirs, landfills and evening commercial real estate. Today, there are federal and state regulations that quarry owners must comply with when quarries become expended. This usually requires a full remediation process to return as much of the area to safe levels.
While you probably do not need a quarry load of stone, sand or salt, we can help meet your on demand need for a variety of quarried materials. Contact us today to learn more about aggregate and delivery options.