Underground utility vehicle specialist MacLean Engineering has purchased the former MTI test facility in Sudbury, Ontario, and intends to use it as the company’s new innovation hub.
The facility on Magill Street, less than a 10-minute drive from the MacLean sales, service and support centre on Kelly Lake Road, includes an approximately 300 m underground ramp down to a depth of some 40 m, at an average grade of 15%.
The underground facility also includes an excavated cavern where shaft jumbo mucking training had previously been conducted, along with a 4,500 km² building on a three-hectare site footprint.
MacLean President Kevin MacLean said: “We intend to utilise this facility as an innovation hub for our company, just as Bob Lipic Sr did with MTI when the test facility was originally developed in 2012.
“I want our activities at site to honour the tradition of mining entrepreneurship that Bob embodied in the Sudbury mining industry.”
Stella Holloway, General Manager for MacLean’s Sudbury operations, said the access to an underground facility provides the company with a “research and development test bed for new products and new technologies, a mine-equivalent setting for conducting quality assurance/quality control checks on MacLean equipment prior to shipping, a place where employees and customers alike can be given hands-on exposure to our equipment in the working environment, as well as a great location for conducting photo and video shoots”.
The new facility will allow the company to “ramp up” its product development and testing efforts, according to MacLean Chairman and Founder Don MacLean.
“I started my mining career in the 1950s working underground at INCO (now part of Vale), this city is where the first MacLean branch was established back in 1995 and we now have 100 employees locally, so the Sudbury basin remains at the core of the MacLean business just as it remains at the heart of mining activity in Canada.”
MacLean is currently embarking on a full electrification of its fleet, a programme that is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
Certain assets of MTI, meanwhile, were sold to Joy Global (now Komatsu Mining) in 2014.