Home grown

From humble beginnings as a quarrying and crushing operation, to the acquisition of a machinery dealership, Screening and Crushing Sales has blossomed into a manufacturer of quarrying equipment, the majority of which is exported.   BY HUGH DE LACY

Given that the overwhelming bulk of New Zealand civil construction machinery is imported, the success of Christchurch firm Screening and Crushing Sales Ltd (SCS) in exporting 80 per cent of its own patented products is all the more remarkable.

SCS manufactures three models of tracked cone crusher, a revolutionary tracked wood-waste grinder/screener, and the Trommex, the poor man’s aggregate screener that attaches to an excavator arm. The company is also the New Zealand agent for the Irish manufacturer Powerscreen, part of the Terex family of global companies and a world leader in dry-screening, washing and recycling equipment for the quarrying, mining and waste management industries.

Working from a handsome factory with a 100 metre by 20 metre workshop near Christchurch International Airport, SCS was founded in the late 1980s by two long-time business associates, Brian Court and Phil Cook. They’re from business rather than engineering backgrounds – a key driver, Court told Q&M, of the pragmatism that has seen them build the company from scratch to its present manufacturing and servicing staff of 40.

The company began as Westway Contracting, a quarry operator and mobile crushing contractor based at Yaldhurst, just a few kilometres from the present site on – so appropriate for a company serving the quarrying industry – Greywacke Road.

The first step in the company’s diversification came with the acquisition of the world-leading Powerscreen agency in 1991, a deal that turned heads in a Canterbury quarrying industry not accustomed to small start-up companies thinking that far outside the square. Powerscreen’s products include the Warrior and Chieftain ranges for screening, the Finesmaster sand and fines recovery units, and the Trommel and Powershredder range of waste screens and shredders.

The dealership proved highly successful for SCS, and the service facilities it installed to operate it provided it with both the plant and the confidence to start making its own crushing equipment. Initially this was just for its own in-house quarrying operation, but not for long.

“We got a lot of people saying, ‘We wouldn’t mind some of that gear as well,’ and next thing we’d started manufacturing crushers,” Court says.

Their first machine, intended for their own quarry, was the TC1000 track-mounted crusher with a one metre diameter crushing chamber, the prototype of which was completed in 1994. It hardly got a taste of Canterbury aggregate before it was bought by an Australian quarryman who shipped it home – and it’s operating there still.

The TC1000 has proved the company’s most popular model of cone-crusher with 60-odd machines in service in New Zealand and Australia, though now the TC1200 is rapidly catching up. Mostly recently SCS has produced a 38-tonne TC1340. Driven by a C12 Caterpillar power unit, it’s one of the biggest track-mounted crushers on the market.

Then there’s the Trommex, the rotary screener that works as an attachment to an excavator and has been the stepping-stone into the quarrying industry for many small operators.

“We’ve had a number of clients who have kicked off on Trommexes and moved on to power-screens once they’d got their cash-flow going,” Court says.

The device, rotating at up to 21rpm and with screens ranging in size from 20mm to 300mm that can be changed inside 10 minutes, can be used for anything from aggregates and coal to soil, compost, sand and even concrete-mixing.

Off at something of a tangent to the quarrying industry, but clearly derived from it, is SCS’s multi-award-winning track-mounted wood-waste grinder, shredder and screener, the 28-tonne Ripper Vertical Shaft Cutter (VSC). This extraordinary machine is filling a long-vacant niche in the forestry and pulp-and-paper industries by converting the eight to 16 per cent of wood left behind after clear-felling into renewable combustible fuel for the factories that process the timber.

“Instead of being bulldozed into windrows and left to rot, the forest residue can be processed through the Ripper, making an ideal fuel for paper mills and board factories that need steam. The Ripper produces an extremely good hog fuel with high calorific values because of the way it grinds waste wood,” Court says.

Among its credits, the Ripper, designed and patented by SCS, this year won the Energywise Renewable Energy Award for clear-felling Tokoroa forestry company Central Wood recyclers, which for the past two years has been supplying hog fuel to the Carter Holt Harvey Kinleith mill. The shredded timber is burned in Kinleith’s CoGen boiler to produce both steam and, by way of an imbedded steam turbine, electricity for the plant.

“It’s a giant, very robust Kitchen Whizz,” Court says.

Emboldened by the sale of its prototype TC1000 cone-crusher into Australia a decade ago, SCS has never limited itself to the New Zealand market. The company doesn’t use agents, but instead sells its machinery direct to end-users in the eastern states of Australia, and in Tahiti, Fiji and New Caledonia.

“The east coast of Australia is a very easy market for us to service. We pick the tyre-kickers pretty quickly, and if a client rings up from there with any issues over the plant we can have one of our six service technicians at their door by midday the following day. The boys even go over to Aussie for oil changes, as well as to carry out checks and training. It’s all about relationships with clients,” Court says.

Exporting to the Pacific Islands has proved worthwhile, especially since the European Union has been pouring development money into the islands’ infrastructure.

“Wherever the EU puts in money for roading we can usually sell equipment – we follow the development funds.”

The downside to that, Court admits, is when the EU stops funding in response to such political transgressions as Fiji’s three – now make that four – military coups. George Speight’s 2000 coup caught SCS with $2.5 million worth of orders for which there was suddenly no money, and Court and Cook are crossing their fingers that Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s current experiment with military dictatorship won’t be equally as expensive.

Already the EU has suspended as much as $50 million in Fijian aid, and New Zealand another $8 million, since the latest – and so far bloodless – coup.

“They’re saying the tourism dollar and the tourists are still going to Fiji, and the situation there is just in-house politics. We hope that’s the case, and anyway we won’t be losing any sleep over it,” Court says.

SCS has plenty of other fish to fry, what with New Zealand’s biggest ever infrastructural spend-up offering plenty of custom for its own crushing equipment and for Powerscreen’s screening products.

And that’s not to mention the rapid uptake of the Ripper, of which two dozen are already in operation on either side of the Tasman, in a world where renewable fuel sources are increasingly seen as the saviours of an over-heating planet.