Project specialist put through its paces

Among the more run of the mill abnormal cargo moves, abnormal transport specialist, Vanguard Rigging, has recently completed the transportation and placement of two antique items of gold-mining machinery. According to MD Bryan Hodgkinson, the stampmills are sited at the Kloofendal Nature Reserve on the West Rand of Johannesburg, and one of them is the legendary 124-year-old Sandy Croft stampmill that gold mining pioneers Fred and Harry Struben shipped to SA from England in the 1880s. The reserve also plays host to the Confidence Reef, the first goldmine on the Witwatersrand, discovered by the Struben brothers. “This was a great community project for us to get involved with,” said Kevin Joubert, project manager, Vanguard. “The Friends of Kloofendal have been planning this for some time, and by coincidence we discovered that we could easily accomplish what they needed.” The mills, weighing approximately eight tons each, were moved from Florida, Roodepoort where the Sandy Croft mill had been standing for the past ten years – using a crane truck to lift and place them on a flatbed truck for transportation. In what might be described as a more mundane abnormal move – certainly from an historical point of view – Vanguard has also just completed a massive, 18-month programme of transformer movements around the country. This, according to Hodgkinson, was the delivery and placement of a series of transformers and rectifiers to various sub-stations nationwide – with each 667-MVA transformer weighing in at 255-tonnes, and 10-metres long by 4.9-m wide by 5.25-m high, and each shunt reactor tipping the scales at 82-t a unit.