DECREASINGdowntime
Rockydale Quarries gains efficiency and
uptime using a screening circuit that
replaces five units with one superior setup.
BY CAROL WASSON
Rockydale Quarries Corp. has a his- tory of playing the right cards. For more than 75 years, it has served its region with high-quality aggregates, agricultural lime, concrete and topsoil. In fact, today’s operation blossomed out of
the Great Depression when the original owners
defaulted on a bank note in 1932. Enter Russell
Holman Willis, then chairman of the bank’s finance committee, who took over the note. Today,
the Willis descendants, the fourth generation of
family shareholders, still own the Roanoke, Va.,
company, and it has prospered and grown to include five aggregate and lime-processing operations around the state.
Located within the Roanoke city limits and
bordered by the Blue Ridge Parkway is the company’s Rockydale Quarry. It’s in close proximity
to residential neighborhoods and parklands.
One of the challenges facing the Rockydale
team was attempting to engineer the most efficiency and uptime into a vertical plant design
erected upon a rather confined and limited foot-
print. The operation processes a Grade A manufactured concrete sand and a premium aglime
product.
Prior to the height of the recent recession,
the plant’s bottleneck was at the screening circuit, which was comprised of an older t wo-deck
flat screen and four Nordberg V-Screens. These
units had been moved to the site from one of the
lime plants. Rockydale selected the V-Screens
owing to the moisture content of the material.
The screening efficiency was adequate, but the
operating and maintenance costs were extremely high. The mechanical gearing of the screens
proved to be difficult and costly to repair, resulting in unplanned downtime.
Therefore, the Rockydale operations team,
consisting of Dan Phlegar, Benny Hopkins and
Gordon Willis III, decided to consult with Bob
Bartok of Paschal Associate Sales, the North
Carolina dealer for Polydeck Screen Corp., a
manufacturer of synthetic screen media. “We
needed to find the most cost-effective, yet efficient screen modifications for our applica-
