Maco Gold Mine – 6x Longer Wear on Slurry Hoses

Located in the Mindanao province in the Philippines, the plant processes about 1,800 tonnes of ore per day.

Like most gold mines, the slurry running through the Maco plant is highly abrasive. They deal with high-pressure slurry running through the lines as well.

Previously, they used industrial rubber hose, which only lasted one month. This meant a crazy cycle of unnecessary maintenance work, patching and replacing spools. To minimise this, they tried using a local slurry hose brand, but that lasted just two months.

They’d heard about Slurryflex mining hoses having a longer wear life, so they contacted us.

The team asked us to look at their issues more deeply, so our piping specialists reviewed all the data and assessed their piping configuration remotely.

We could see two challenges they were dealing with:
1. High wear rate from abrasive slurry
2. High pressures were causing high end-pull and movement

We recommended they trial heavy-duty mining hoses with thick wear liners and high-pressure swivel flanges to handle the end-pull and movement.

We custom manufactured the 6-metre DN200 Slurryflex hoses in our Brisbane factory and delivered them to site for installation.

It didn’t take long before they could see the results. After the maintenance team installed the hoses, they were still going strong 12 months later—that’s more than a 6x longer wear life.