CUT & CARRY

Series

Series Name: Mining Review 7th Year

Issue

Issue No.

Date Released

Aug 1954

Stories in this Issue:

Story

Story No. within this Issue

3 / 4

Summary

BFI synopsis: cutting and lifting coal with scraper boxes at Plean Colliery, Scotland
NCB Commentary - To keep pace with the rising demand, more and more machines are needed in British mines that will load coal at the same time as cut it. Here, at Plean Colliery in Scotland, scraper-boxes are doing both jobs in one.
Here’s how it works. Fix a knife blade to a box, pull it along the coal face, and see how it peels off the coal. Hinge the back of the box, to swing one way only, and the cut coal will be drawn along in one direction, but the box will ride over the coal on the back stroke. Put another knife at the other end of the box, and the return stroke will cut coal as well. Now we have a tool that cuts coal both ways and loads it in one direction. Put several scraper boxes in the coal face and they will cut and shift coal from on to the other, and so away to be loaded.
A 250 h.p. winch is used to drag the boxes up and down the face, At Plean, the control point is nearly half a mile from the face, but the operator can follow on his indicator the exact position of the boxes as they travel up and down along the coal. On the coal face guide rails are used to keep the boxes pressed tight up against the coal. These guide rails are controlled by pneumatic pushers, and it’s one man’s job to keep the rails pushed in at the right place. As the knives on the scraper boxes cut more and more deeply under the coal face, the overhanging coal parts from the roof and falls to be collected by the boxes.
Behind the pusher operator come the prop setters. The roof here is so good that no bars are needed, and wedge props are simply set three feet apart.
After the propsetters come the drawers off. They clean up the spilled coal, and then take down the back row of props as the face advances, leaving the roof to cave in behind them.
Here at Plean, 31 men have been averaging over 230 tons a shift, with a bigger output possible if they could get it away quickly enough. That’s pretty good going, and the coal’s not all small stuff either.

Researcher Comments

Commentary recorded 2 July 1954.

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