Vertical Conveyors

A pair of vertical conveyors at Ashio Copper Mine runs between two levels of the processing plant, each conveyor a bucket elevator inside a steel-clad housing rising from the lower floor up through the ceiling above. The housings are riveted steel, painted in the pale industrial green that runs across the rest of the plant. Each housing carries a small inspection door at chest height for the lower-pulley maintenance access. The drive motors sit at the top end on the upper level, coupled through reduction gears to the upper pulley shaft. The buckets inside are visible through one of the open inspection doors: steel scoops bolted at regular intervals to a continuous chain or belt loop.

Vertical conveyors handle the lift work in a mineral processing plant where the ore needs to go up instead of down. Bucket elevators are the standard arrangement: the chain or belt loop turns at the top, picks up ore at the bottom, and dumps it at the top through a discharge spout. Ashio used vertical conveyors where the layout demanded it across the operational life of the works under Furukawa modernisation from 1877 to the Excavation Department's 1973 closure. The conveyors in this photograph stopped at that time and have not moved since. The buckets are where they were on the last revolution.