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McLanahan Builds Its Largest Primary Impact Crusher

McLanahan has built and shipped the largest Primary Impact Crusher it has ever manufactured – a New Holland style impactor weighing more than 200,000 pounds. The impactor has a 74” wide by 125” tall feed opening and can handle up to 3,500 tons an hour of quarry shot rock. It can reduce feed lumps as large as 71” down to 6” with minimal fines generation. 

Design features

McLanahan’s Primary Impact Crushers are designed with several special features, including a high-inertia, solid-body rotor that uses less horsepower to process material and a large expansion chamber to provide greater secondary breakage. Plus, at ½ horsepower per ton, McLanahan’s New Holland style Impactor uses a fraction of the power that other impact crushers require to do the same job, saving on operational costs.

“Between the angle of feed introduced into the rotor, the inertia of the rotor and the expansion chamber, this allows for the performance that we get out of a New Holland style that you don’t see in other types of impactors,” said Mark Krause, Managing Director of McLanahan North America.

One advantage to this style of crusher is a reduction in the amount of fines produced.

“Normally, the complaint people have about impactors is producing too many fines,” Krause shared. “This style of impactor is not going to produce that level of fines.”

Another feature of McLanahan’s New Holland style Primary Impact Crusher is a hydraulically retractable hood for unencumbered access to the interior. This is an advantage that McLanahan adapted from the Andreas style Impactor, which is a lower profile crusher.

“The original New Holland design did not have the hydraulic opening,” Krause explained. “It was designed so that people could crawl through side doors to get in and maintain it; they literally climbed inside the machine. By adding the hydraulics, it makes it a lot safer and a lot easier for people to get in and do the inspections and maintenance.”

Engineering enormous impactors

Like any machine McLanahan designs for a customer, the process begins with gathering as much information as possible about the application, including material type, feed gradation, maximum feed size, desired capacity, moisture content and required product size, to name a few.

From there, McLanahan’s experienced engineering team uses the application data to design a machine that will be able to handle the feed material to meet product and capacity expectations. Then they work closely with the production team before and during the manufacturing process, focusing on tasks like material handling, part setup, fixtures and tooling.

Specifically with a machine as large as this New Holland Primary Impact Crusher, a great deal of planning is involved to ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible.

“The biggest challenge with designing a machine of this size is bringing each piece together so they fit together as they should,” explained Engineering Field Service Technician Blake Pinckney. “Before we finished with the design stage and moved into the drawing stage of this project, engineering sat down with manufacturing and went through each section of the machine to make the build move smoothly through the shop.”

Once the Impactor was assembled, all the moving parts, including the hydraulics and the rotor, were tested and inspected to ensure everything operated as designed. Then, the machine was disassembled into manageable pieces and loaded onto trucks to be delivered to the customer. 

Why McLanahan Impact Crushers

When a customer works with McLanahan on a crushing project, they’re getting more than just a reliable machine. They’re getting a crusher designed and manufactured by a knowledgeable team with years of experience in many types of crushing applications. 

“We’re one of the few who actually understand a New Holland design,” said Krause. “We can sit down and talk to somebody about their needs and deliver what they need. Having an understanding of both Andreas and New Holland Impactors and then being able to create a hybrid machine means we get to pick the best of both worlds. I don’t know anyone else in the world that does that these days.”

Pinckney added, “We specialize in designing equipment to fit the application. Sometimes the standard equipment is not what the customer needs. Plus, we love this stuff, especially those applications that process big feed into small product!”

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