GLOBAL MICROTUNNELLING GIANT CHOOSES TRIED AND TRUE

Ward & Burke’s new Faccin plate roller helps bring operations in-house

When you are a world leader in microtunnelling, you know a thing or two about the equipment needed to operate efficiently. And when Ward & Burke, an Ireland-based civil engineering firm, expanded its Canadian operations, it made sense that it would look at adding familiar machines.

“We have about 200 employees across our shop facilities in Newmarket, Ont.; Calgary, Alta.; and Vancouver,” said Robert Ward, president, Ward & Burke. “We primarily deal with maintenance of heavy plant equipment and fabrication of tunnelling accessories. Right now we have welders, plasma cutters, punches, and all the usual sort of steel fabricating equipment you could expect in a facility our size.”

One of the things Ward & Burke strives for is quality. Tunnelling and shaft work can be very high risk as workers are constantly dealing with difficult ground conditions. All of its work is centred around long-distance underground tunnels, where a remote-controlled tunnelling machine moves from one shaft to another. The equipment needs to be able to manoeuvre across half a mile of rocks, boulders, water, and whatever it encounters without getting stuck. The tunnelling equipment does not have the ability to reverse, so it’s important that it is robust and capable of tunnelling through tough materials.

“We typically make around 200 shafts per year in North America, and every shaft we make has a rolled edge at the front of it, which is roughly 10 m in diameter,” said Ward. “All of these features need to be fabricated before ever going to the site. Basically, we fabricate in batches. Almost all of our components are circular, so we make all the forms, then the platforms that the workers need to walk on to build the shafts. In a batch, there’s typically a steel leading edge, former, and platform that need to be produced, and that can take upwards of several months.”

To do this successfully in-house, the shop needed a plate roller. It was important for the company to look for something that offered reliability, especially because of the nature of the work it was doing, and came with the backing of service and support to ensure that the machine could keep running for years to come.