Completely or not at all: Those who open a new business segment usually do not want to do things by halves in order to establish themselves on the market, but want to get fully involved. Otherwise, you can let it stay the same – that’s a common theory. But even managing director Josef Seizmeir never dreamed that the Jura quarry in the Altmühltal, which was taken over by SH-Jura, would develop so rapidly.
In 2015, he had taken over a quarry near Titting, together with a mining permit and corresponding obligations such as recultivation. Originally, the extracted raw material was to be used to supply his own construction sites with chippings and crushed stone. However, other buyers of the building materials were found, and in fact, considerably more than initially planned. Josef Seizmeir’s natural stone trade markets filling material for gardening and landscaping when he does not need it himself. Originally he had assumed 100,000 tons of material.
“In 2019 we will have turned over 150 000 tons and have thus reached the limit of our capacity,” says Josef Seizmeir. This has resulted in investments in order to adjust to the increased demand and to make the extraction of raw materials more efficient.
In the beginning, the basic idea was to be independent with its own deposit. But in the meantime, we are receiving more and more inquiries for chippings and crushed stone due to the brisk construction activity, especially around the conurbations of Munich, Ingolstadt, and Nuremberg. It is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain a mining permit for gravel there so that we are in demand with our building materials produced in the Altmühltal. In view of the demand in the construction industry, it would be an urgent task for our politicians to ensure that sufficient permits are obtained and to simplify the approval procedures,”
explains Josef Seizmeir. The reason why his products have more and more customers has to do with the service concept that his employees live by. “The customers know that we do not have rigid, bureaucratic opening hours and that they can also come to us on Saturday or Friday afternoon and be served,” says civil engineer Josef Seizmeir junior, who has been a co-partner in his father’s company for three years now and supports him as construction manager.
A formerly agricultural area of land next to the existing deposit has now been acquired in order to be able to further expand the mining of the Jura quarry. An additional 1.5 hectares have thus been added so that the entire mining area now covers 80,000 square meters.
A Cat 336FLN crawler excavator equipped with a hydraulic breaker has been used to process and crush the material for the crusher.
At the end of the conveyor belt, a 962M Cat wheel loader with its 3.8 cubic meter bucket picked it up again and fed trucks. This should continue to be the case.
A fresh breeze is now coming into operation in the form of a further extraction machine, because from now on a Cat 982M wheel loader is to reinforce it.
“This moves the company into a new league in terms of machine technology, considering that the company’s origins were in road and gala construction, where compact machine sizes dominate,”
says Jürgen Karremann, Sales Director Bavaria, responsible for the Zeppelin Munich branch and also the main supplier of the construction machines used by the Seizmeir Group.
150 million years of earth history have left their traces in the Altmühltal: Fossils like ammonites bear witness to the fact that a sea once covered the earth here. The deposits that formed the Jurassic limestone were formed. The layers are usually separated by layers of clay and vary in thickness. In order to extract the slabs and blocks, the company wants to use the concentrated power in the form of the new Cat 982M. It starts with its lifting tooth, pushes it under the layer, and then breaks it out. It is hard to imagine the immense forces the construction machine has to exert. For this reason, the loader has been reinforced with an additional counterweight to ensure that the load is distributed evenly over the machine.
“Degradation must change so that we can produce differently. In the future, we also want to produce ingots, but not process them ourselves,”
explains Stefan Hausmann, authorized signatory of the Seizmeir Group. This is intended to expand the product range. “Some areas of the deposit are too bad to break the raw material into chippings and crushed stone. They are better suited for ashlars,” adds Josef Seizmeir. He wants to exploit as much of the deposit as possible and use the entire value-added.
For this reason, the lifting tooth was chosen as the equipment for the 35-tonne loader in order to break out layer after layer. The loader has not yet reached the end of its job of loosening the natural stone – it also has to load the blocks with a volume of around ten cubic meters and a weight of up to 27 tonnes. For this task, the Cat 982M uses a quick coupler to replace the lifting tooth with a stone fork.
Josef Seizmeir is also an entrepreneur with the versatility of construction machinery in mind. Its activity profile ranges from crushing, loading, and removal of overburden to clearing the deposit.
“With the construction machine, we are a bit more flexible. Should a wheel loader fail, we can also use the Cat 982M with its shovel in an emergency,”
he says. The machine can be used with the Cat 962M or a Cat 924H, which also handles loading operations and equips its own trucks as well as customers’ trucks when they order more chippings and gravel.
“We have contrasted drilling and blasting with wheel loader operations. There are no differences in cost. What speaks in favor of the wheel loader, however, is that we can use it to reduce blasting, which we are allowed to do, but also in terms of lower emissions, we can extract the raw material with as little vibration as possible,”
says the entrepreneur. Against the background of low-emission operation, the installed engine technology, based on the latest technology, also plays a not inconsiderable role. The power supply on the site is also sustainable – a building or office container has been fitted with photovoltaic modules on the facade and a power storage unit to make it self-sufficient. Power is supplied to the exterior lighting, the scales, the computer and printer, the LTE connection with live camera monitoring, and real-time data transfer to a cloud.
Source: Caterpillar/Zeppelin
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