How To Start A Mining Business With The Right Equipment

Mining is an industry that only increases in importance while resources become more scarce. There is a lot to cover with regard to setting up a mining company. However, entrepreneurs who launch mining businesses with the right equipment excel in the industry. You can even purchase the right tools by taking out an equipment loan. Whether the mining operation is carried out on the surface or deep underground, the same principles of acquiring precious minerals still apply. As such, the equipment used to get to, collect, and transport these minerals are essentially the same. In this article, we cover how to start a mining business with the right resources.

Understand Where To Start

This is the first and most risky step but if you can find the right resources you can make a lucrative career. Depending on where you are or where you are looking there are geological surveys and mining contracts that can be found. Whether you pay for this yourself or find a resource, the next step is signing the paperwork and the funding. Each of these can be their own topic themselves so we’ll skip the fine details. Depending on what you find, you’ll need to arrange for the right kind of gear. Next to qualified workers, the equipment to dig is the most important part of the operation.

Invest In Various Diggers

Although it can be stressful for entrepreneurs to buy new equipment, you need quality diggers. The diggers are the cornerstone of any mining operation. They are the primary extractor of the coveted resources that sustain modern-day society. As such, there is a wide variety of digging machines available. Each one is designed to retrieve minerals in different scenarios. We’ve listed a few of the most common ones below.

Drills

Drills are the tool of choice for offshore rigs and underground mining operations. They allow miners to reach pockets of resources deep underground. Those pockets would otherwise be impractical to reach with conventional surface digging tools. These drills can vary in size and features depending on their intended objective. For example, a drill with a larger diameter is often used to create mine shafts that could be entered by humans and other machines to construct large tunnel networks at this depth. Other drills, specifically those on oil rigs, are also equipped with tubes to pump “mud” into the hole. Miners use them to cool the drill bit and maintain the structural integrity of the hole.

Longwall Miners

Longwall miners are specialized machines that make digging out long stretches of material a relatively trivial task. This is why they are most commonly used in coal mining where the coal is often found as seams of several hundred meters in length. These machines are first set up by digging out a tunnel at one end of a coal seam. After, rails and supports laid down along the length of the tunnel. These longwall miners come in two varieties depending on the size of the seam: a smaller, faster plough that eat away at the coal seam along the length of the installed rails, and a large and slow shear type that consists of a large shearing drum, carving out large sections of the coal seam as it goes along.

Excavators

Additionally, excavators are the ones most commonly used in open-pit and strip mining operations. Excavators used in mining are not that different from the ones that you would see on a construction site – their ‘business end’ consists of a bucket on the end of a hydraulically powered boom, which is controlled by an operator sitting inside the cab of the excavator. The distinguishing feature of the mining excavator is its size, as they are often several times larger and more powerful than their urban counterparts.

Draglines

Also called a dragline excavator, draglines are specialized excavators. They are typically used in strip mining operations to remove large amounts of overburden (rocks and other materials above the resource to be mined) in strip mining operations. As the name suggests, the bucket of a dragline is not directly attached to the boom. Instead, it hangs on wire ropes instead. Weighing several thousand tons, draglines have to be dismantled for transport. Miners reassemble them on site. Then, the completed structure can reach several stories tall.

After you purchase all of these necessary pieces of equipment, reach out to a reliable insurance company. Get business equipment insurance to protect your new tools. That way, you can focus on building your mining business and avoid worrying about your equipment.

Purchase Quality Crushers

Furthermore, you need to purchase crushers. As the name implies, crushers are the machines that break down collected material into smaller, more manageable pieces to be hauled off to refineries off-site. Crushers vary mostly in terms of their size and the method of crushing, which both affect their loading capacity. Some of the most common types include the jaw crusher that compresses rocks in a jaw like structure like a nutcracker; the cone crusher that crushes rocks between a gyrating cone and the wall of the crusher; and the impact crusher that pulverizes rocks with hammers.

Set Up A Conveyor System

If the mined resources are the lifeblood of a mining operation, the conveyor systems would be the blood vessels. Conveyors are composed of a series of continuously running belts, pulleys, and motors. They are used for the efficient transportation of large quantities of materials across short to moderate distances. Conveyor systems most commonly serve as the bridge between components of a larger mineral processing system, which includes the crusher and various devices that scan and analyze the collected materials.