Bluegrass Materials partners with its dealer in the design and construction of a new aggregates plant.
Operating since the 1950s, Bluegrass Materials’ Bowling Green South Quarry in Kentucky still has 90 years of life remaining, but the operation’s plant was well past its prime and plagued by costly maintenance issues.
David Miles, CEO of Process Machinery, knew there would be a lot of competition for the job to design, fabricate and build the new plant, but he believed his team’s 34-year history would set it apart.
“We listened to their goals and tried to provide the best engineered project we could offer them,” Miles says. “They had a vision of what they wanted this plant to be, and we worked hard to give it to them. In the end, I think we brought the best solution to the table, and at a good value, and that’s why they decided to go with us.”
Challenging material
The quarry manager, Bill Bob Lindsey, had been waiting to get a new plant for the past 20 years and was excited to be a part of the team sharing ideas about what the new plant should look like. But what he couldn’t envision was how Process Machinery was going to design a system to deal with rock from four distinct ledges.
“The rock here presents some challenges,” Lindsey says. “We have scrubber stone that has to be kept separate. It can’t be mixed with any other material, so we needed a way to bypass the surge. While this may sound simple, it’s really very, very complicated. But they came up with a design that could do it.”
The end result is a design using an extremely flexible and comprehensive blending system that allows the plant to make a full gamut of stone with a lot of blending combinations, as well as sand and lime products.
For the Bowling Green South Quarry project, Process Machinery selected Baldor’s Dodge Torque-Arm II gearboxes, Imperial and Type E bearings, Mine Duty Extra pulleys, and Baldor-Reliance Quarry Duty and Severe Duty motors.
Time saver
Process Machinery also relies on Baldor’s System-1 group, a team that facilitates the design, quotation and order processing of multiple products for project support. Craig Hartlage, project manager for Process Machinery, says he has partnered with the System-1 group for more than 15 years, calling it his one-stop spot to get everything he needs from Baldor.
“Not only do they provide us with a quote for all the electrical and mechanical components,” says Hartlage, “they also make sure the pulleys are preassembled with the correct bushings, shaft and bearings to our specifications. This is a real time-saver for us, because all our team has to do is mount the assembled package. The time we save helps us to increase the throughput in our shop.”
Take note
The end result is a design using an extremely flexible and comprehensive blending system that allows the plant to make a full gamut of stone with a lot of blending combinations, as well as sand and lime products.
Bluegrass Materials
Bluegrass Materials Co. is an aggregates and concrete block producer headquartered in Jacksonville, Fla. The company’s operations are located in Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. The Kentucky operations are primarily located in and around the city of Bowling Green (Warren and Ohio Counties) and in rural areas in close approximation to the Kentucky-Virginia border (Lechter, Bell, and Harlan Counties). The company also operates a granite quarry near Edgefield, S.C., serving the Aiken, S.C., area; a limestone plant in Calhoun, Tenn.; and a sand plant in St George, Ga., which supplies the Jacksonville market with concrete, masonry, golf, and fill sand products.
Earlier this year, Bluegrass Materials purchased the assets of Lafarge North America’s Ball Ground, Clayton, Cumming and Douglasville quarries located in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Ted Baker II, CEO of Bluegrass Materials said, “This is a terrific opportunity for Bluegrass Materials to continue to build the company and will significantly expand our aggregates footprint into one of the most dynamic markets in the country. We are very much looking forward to working with the employees at these facilities and to continuing the high standard of safety excellence that they have set.”
