Pace Cranes has delivered a Sennebogen 655 Dragline to Rangitata Diversion Race Management Limited (RDRML) located 113km south of Christchurch on the South Island of New Zealand.
The Rangitata Diversion Race was a dream in the minds of the pioneering farmers in Mid Canterbury when the 750,000 acre plain was first farmed in the mid-19th Century. Regarded as the largest area of nearly flat land in New Zealand, all development was closely linked to water problems – water races to supply stock on light soils and water courses to drain heavy swamp lands.
Construction of the 67Km long canal that would ultimately span the breadth of Mid Canterbury started in 1937 and was completed in 1944. Today river water is abstracted from 2 alpine rivers, the largest, the Rangitata provides approximately 90% of the canal’s capacity. The Rangitata, like all alpine rivers in the South Island is an active river fed from a large catchment area that receives a lot of rainfall over the year. The mean flow in the river is 80 m3/s, but it often floods to ten times that amount and occasionally far beyond that! When the river is in flood a large quantity of sand and gravel enters the RDRML; without the ability to clean the entrance to the canal in an efficient manner, it would quickly become choked and limit the amount of water able to be abstracted.
RDRML’s previous dragline is over 50 years old and as the RDRML CEO Ben Curry said, “It had done its dash”. The company spent some time assessing a number of options for a replacement, but ultimately decided upon the Sennebogen 655. “Making such a significant capital investment meant detailed analysis of all the facets of the various options. Whatever option we went with, the solution had to be an long lasting one. Again and again, the Sennebogen came out on top of our list for VFM, reliability, serviceability, practicality and safety. In the end the decision was a pretty simple one.”
The SENNEBOGEN 655 duty cycle crane was delivered with 29 m of boom and configured for dragline operations utilising a 2 cubic meter bucket.
The 655 HD’s sturdy mechanical components are particularly well-suited to dynamic tasks. They include extremely wide, robust pulleys which keep ropes reliably in place and can withstand huge loads. Fitted with the optional second rotation gear, which comes into its own particularly when the 655 HD is used with a dragline bucket, because as well as providing extra torque it also saves huge amounts of time when emptying the bucket. And the newly-designed fairlead keeps lateral movement in the luffing rope to a minimum thanks to a pulley rope guide in the base of the boom.
Pace Cranes is the sole distributor for Sennebogen Cranes in Australia and New Zealand.