Extraction of slate in Brazil
09april
Extraction of slate in Brazil
1. View of the slate quarry
This photo clearly shows one of the quarries for the extraction of gray-black slate. What immediately catches your eye is the structure of the pit terrace. Although all vertical surfaces were created by sawing slate, horizontal surfaces are the natural planes of the cut. This strictly horizontal orientation is unique in this form and makes up the Brazilian slate. Since the slate never moved and did not form in the formation process, it was able to maintain its uniqueness, so it could be processed into high-quality slate products.
If you now look at the upper part of the quarry, you will see huge masses of land that you had to remove in order to reach the main deposits of the stone. In the upper zones of the quarry the shale is of lower quality, and the main extraction of high-quality slate occurs at the bottom, the deeper the slate is mined, the better it is, and correspondingly, more.
Here, in this quarry, gray-black shale is produced with a wide range of shades of gray.
In the production of oil shale, much attention is paid to its quality, which makes it possible to use it with confidence in the manufacture of kitchen countertops, steps, bases of shower cabins, as well as in the interior and exterior. Less quality coatings often come both to domestic and to external small processing companies, which are already transferring their products to exporters, and those in turn sell them under their own names. In the European market there are many offers at attractive prices. A particularly large amount of low-grade Here, in this quarry, gray-black slate is produced with a wide range of shades of gray. enters the market, during the rainy season, when the lower sections of the quarry are flooded and mining is conducted only in the upper layers of the quarry.
2. The extraction process
This image is a detailed view of the level of mining in the quarry. Brazilian slate is mined only at the deepest level. Please, pay attention to the person at the front of this level, we want to consider it in more details in the next picture.
3. Basic slate plates
Here you can see an employee who divides the entire lower level into rectangular slabs about 200x300 cm in size. These are the contours of the later untreated blocks from which the base slate plates are made, as well as untreated plates for further processing at factory. The maximum cutting depth of the saw blade determines the height of the coarse blocks. Because of strong sunlight, employees protect themselves with sunglasses and cover the whole body with clothing to protect themselves from strong ultraviolet radiation.
4. Separation of slate slabs
The blocks allocated in this way are torn from the surface by a wheel loader, it strikes the block at ground level several times with forks, which allows separating the slate block and then raising it.
5. Loading slate on the truck
Loading of slate blocks takes place under the supervision of workers who monitor the quantity and their uniform distribution on the truck. After loading and additional fixing, the shale blocks are sent to the processing plant in the finished material.