4.2 km Overland Conveyor Gantry & Transfer Towers
Modular, pre-assembled conveyor trestles, gallery lattice bridges and transfer towers moving diamond ore across rough Kalahari terrain — designed for containerised assembly with zero on-site welding.
Project data
- Client
- Orapa Diamond Operations
- Location
- Orapa Diamond Fields, Botswana
- Year completed
- 2023
- Tonnage
- 3 100 t
- Length
- 4.2 km of gallery and trestle
- Steel grade
- S355JR structural carbon steel
- Coating
- Hot-dip galvanized, 85 µm minimum
- Modules
- 312 pre-assembled bolt-together units
- Site welding
- Zero
Skilled coded welders are scarce and expensive in the Kalahari, and mobilising a welding crew for 4.2 km of gallery would have dominated the project budget. Ambient dust also makes field welding quality difficult to guarantee.
We re-engineered the conveyor gallery as a fully bolted system: 312 modules, each sized to a standard 12 m flat-rack, with HSFG bolted splices and direct tension indicators in place of every field weld. Modules were shop-assembled, galvanized and match-marked, then shipped in erection sequence so the site crew could build straight off the truck.
Erected by a semi-skilled local crew with a torque-wrench methodology and no field welding whatsoever. The bolted approach cut site labour cost by an estimated 40 % against a welded equivalent.
Engineering highlights
- ▹312 containerised, bolt-together modules
- ▹Zero on-site welding — HSFG bolts with tension indicators
- ▹Shipped in erection sequence to eliminate site laydown
- ▹Erected by a semi-skilled local crew under EST supervision
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