If anyone can claim to be an aggregate equipment expert, it is Sepro’s very own Dom Corsetti. As head of the Sepro Aggregates Division in Montreal, Dom delves into the history and highlights of Sepro’s aggregate division in our latest insider interview.

From its beginnings as Carminex, Sepro Aggregates has continued to be a major innovator in the aggregate industry. In our new interview, Dom details a few of the major contracts he has experienced during his tenure such as working with a well-known construction aggregate company in Quebec, a ship loading facility in Gaspe Peninsula, and more!

Sepro Aggregates: Dependable, Quality Aggregate Equipment

Sepro Aggregates offers a wide range of aggregate equipment including jaw crushers, cone crushers, screening equipment, and more. Our experienced team is always available to answer your questions and set you up for success with your next project. Feel free to reach out to our aggregate equipment experts for help with finding the right equipment for your project!

Full Transcript Below

Cheryl:

Hi, I’m Cheryl Pyper. I’m the Marketing Coordinator here at Sepro Systems in Vancouver, Canada. Today I’m talking with my colleague Dom Corsetti of our Sepro Montreal office. Basically, he heads up the Sepro Aggregates Division in the Montreal office. I’m excited to talk to him today about some projects that he’s worked on through the years and just to get to know him a bit better. So thank you for joining me today, Dom. Just wanted to start off by asking you some of your background and your history and your training in the industry and how you got here today.

Dom:

Thanks very much for having me, Cheryl. So I’m a mechanical engineer by profession. I studied at the University of Concordia specialized in gas turbine theory, just because I loved airplanes growing up as a child. And I had aspirations probably, you know, like any kid, working for Boeing or one of the major airline companies in the future. However, my dad had different ideas at the time. Basically, Carminex in a nutshell started in 1988 as a consulting firm in the basement of our house. My dad was one of the founders. He had a partner by the name of Claude Gauthier. Over the years started selling, you know, the odd parts/service with quarries and mining industries. And before you knew it, we were a full-blown fabricator. Subsequently moved obviously from the basement of our house to a small shop on the South shore of Montreal and over the summers when I wasn’t in school I would work there. You know, doing the odd job, cutting steel, drilling holes. Eventually, I got involved in some assembly work, conveyors mostly. And that was pretty much it.

Dom:

After I graduated, my dad said, “you know, I’m getting old – I want to retire one day, so you need to come and work in the aggregate industry, forget about your dreams of airplanes. We need to buy out my debt. We need to buy out the partner at the time.” So that was pretty much it and I’ve been in the industry ever since. I love it. There are many aspects of it that, you know, becoming a mechanical engineer certainly helps because you get to touch on mechanics, hydraulics, electrical stuff. So it’s worked out, it’s worked out very well, actually. I still love what I’m doing today.

Cheryl:

Well, that’s great. And yeah, just to put a note in here, Sepro Systems bought Carminex, your company, in 2018, and you stayed on as our engineering manager for aggregates, and we’re the better for it. So that’s why we’re talking to you today. We don’t actually know very much about you as we’re in different offices. So I appreciate you joining me today. So I thought that we could talk about some projects that you have, Dom, some bigger projects, and kind of explain the scope and all of the planning and details that went into these projects. Some of the specifications around them, and just like a bit of an overview on, on, you know, what you’ve done in the past few years. And I know there’s one large, large project that you did for a fixed crushing and screening plant for processing limestone. If you could kind of run through that.

Dom:

Well, that would be the first that would definitely come to mind because it was the biggest project that we’ve ever done with Carminex as a company. The scope was huge. Like you mentioned, essentially it was an entire quarry layout. The only aspect that we weren’t involved in was the dynamiting stage of the actual limestone, but from primary crushing, right until the final product – 0-5 millimetres, 5-17, and 1-11 – all the equipment that went into processing that type of material, we were involved in. Basically, we started with a clean slate. The customer gave us a process flow diagram, like everything else, and starts off with all these lines, intersecting lines all over the place. And eventually, you begin with a layout to make sure that everything fits properly. And from there we begin the design stage. Probably just because the scope of the project was so big, we were approached by a few of the bigger companies and we sort of formed a joint venture with Sandvik. So they would provide us with the crusher and the feeders and screens, and we pretty much incorporated all our designs. So generally the project we started with a primary crusher, which fed a 1300 foot long regenerative conveyor, we call them. So basically it’s going downhill and it pretty much flows down, with the help of gravity. So when you size, you know, the motor for it, it kind of becomes undersized just because gravity is pushing it down. So we use it pretty much to just hold the belt up. From there it went into this huge reservoir, and from there, it went out to a scalping screen, which sort of separates the oversized rocks, from the smaller ones, the bigger oversized rocks end up in the first stage of crushing, which are the cone crushers. The oversized of the cone crushers went into the secondary cone crushers, and eventually went to towers for screening and separating. So we finally ended up with three stockpiles of the required material that the customer was looking for.

Cheryl:

Hmm. Wow. And then, you guys put together the entire plant, like chutes and all the little bits and pieces, everything that was required.

Dom:

Yes, exactly. So, I mean, yeah, I mean engineering-wise, it was definitely a very big undertaking because we ended up with probably 50 conveyors, all the different transfer points. So it’s not like any of these conveyors were the same, you know, you have different lengths, different elevations, some were crisscrossing. It’s not like everything was in a straight line and followed nicely. None of that was the case, this project. So, I mean, yeah, that was quite the endeavor trying to coordinate all the different draftsmen to make sure that everything sort of fit. And at the same time, I mean, you’re trying to keep up with fabrication as well, which in our case wasn’t too bad because basically you would just walk down from our offices and we were in our fab shop. So I mean, that definitely had its advantages.

Dom:

I mean, we were able to fix things in a hurry. Obviously, you know, prior to anything getting painted and that sort of stuff. Yeah. So that definitely helped. And I mean, we had, I don’t know how many transports from our South shore office to the Gaspe region. Endless transport trucks were leaving you know, every day. And I mean, and then we have, we also had our installation team up there, so we actually left on site all our equipment. Yeah, so coordination, logistics, fabrication, engineering, all of the subcontractors. Yeah, It was quite big for us. Yeah. So from beginning to.

Cheryl:

I was thinking like this isn’t, this wasn’t a three-month project. Like, I’m assuming this was how long?

Dom:

You would think it wasn’t a three-month project. Right. But like everything else, in this industry, there’s always an aggressive timeline. Stay away from an aggressive timeline. That ain’t never happens. Right? So, yeah, it was more like four to six months. Wow. So yeah, I know it was an aggressive timeline and having the advantage of our shop. So obviously there were, you know, maybe 50 or 60% of the drawings were Dom and everything is staggered. So as soon as something was Dome, we built it. And obviously, you will encounter problems doing it that way, but you know, we didn’t really have a choice and we certainly weren’t going to get a year to do this project.

Cheryl:

Well, that’s very impressive. I’m impressed. Logistically that’s kind of overwhelming, but you know, obviously, you did well on that project because you got the next project that fit into that. Which was a Ship Loading Facility. Correct. So the whole objective for the customer at the time was to be able to produce this type. So this, I mean, not all limestone is the same way. Not all limestone has the same or equivalent hardnesses and stuff. So this one was a particularly good one for the Florida market. So Gaspe limestone was all headed for the Florida market. And that’s why the second phase of the project was basically to transport the rocks, the final product rocks, like the 0-5 millimetre, the 5-17, 1-11 onto what they call belly dump trucks. And then eventually made their way through a series of conveyors and stockpiles and reclaimed conveyors onto a boat. And the boat, you know, being these huge, large, well, I think they call them VLOC (Very Large Ore Carriers) basically. And because they’re so big, they can’t really position themselves on the port.

Dom:

So they all were sort of, you know, they all were maybe a couple of hundred feet off. So that’s where our grasshopper conveyors came in, that you could manipulate and move in and out as many as you needed in order to be able to reach the bulk wherever it was. And once again, the boat also had an aggressive timeline, which means that they were basically given 24 to 26 hours to load the boat or else there would be huge penalties. And capacity was quite big. I think if we were doing about 1800 tonnes an hour on those conveyors and it was all making its way to Florida.

Cheryl:

Okay. So there was a lot of conveyors and different equipment, but you would have been having maybe different sized boats. Were some things interchangeable? Where could you edit or add as needed like long term for this facility?

Dom:

Correct. So, okay. So basically we started with the layout of the actual port. We had an actual dimension of the port and we figured at most we needed 1200 feet of conveyors. At least we needed about 500. So we built 11 or 12 conveyors, a hundred feet long that were mobile on the port. And they were linked with electric cables. And so you could remove as you needed, or add as you needed. And that was pretty much it. And they were all the same. So once we got the original design Dome for one of them – this is one of the unique times where we could actually mass produce something once we had the original design. So that was, that was a very good project, pretty straight forward.

Cheryl:

Great. Well that’s interesting, you know, from basically a quarry to customer, essentially, you, you were encompassing that.

Dom:

Yeah. Excellent.

Cheryl:

Was there anything that stood out to you as a big pain in the butt that you overcame or something that was kind of a feather in your cap that you felt really proud about those projects that was like, you know, a hard thing to overcome?

Dom:

Well, I mean, probably the biggest thing is the timeline, right? Aggressive timelines. But you, I mean, you would think that a huge project or a scope of this magnitude you would have you know, you’d have like daily or weekly meetings with the customer – but we didn’t! And that’s probably because we have had, we had a really good relationship with the customer in the past. So it was sort of solid, so once the layout was Dome, they pretty much left us alone to do it. But, like I said before, the major, one of the stumbling blocks is definitely aggressive timelines to try and coordinate everything. I mean, if you can avoid an aggressive timeline, if you can, hopefully, you’ll have a good relationship, a solid relationship with the customer number one. And two, your team, you’re only as good as your team, right. So from engineering, purchasing, procurement, make sure that everyone’s on the same page and ready to work. You can accomplish anything. Yeah, I would say.

Cheryl:

That’s very true and I’m just, I’m very impressed at the whole, at the whole explanation of it. I think it’s very interesting. I kind of wish you guys had some video of the final project, like in operation with, you know, at the site of the boat at the ship loading facility. But

Dom:

Oddly enough, we have a video of it Cheryl.

Cheryl:

Do you? Well as a marketing person, I’m gonna bug you until I get that.

Dom:

I’m going to have to find it exactly on a CD. Unfortunately, we did it like 5 years ago, but I do have one. I do have one. Excellent. I’ll definitely mail it to, okay.

Cheryl:

That would be great. Well, well, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing this experience and a bit of a project overview with me. I think that we’ll be contacting you again soon to pick your brain about other projects that you’ve worked on. But thank you so much for meeting with me today. And we’ll talk to you soon. Thank you Dom.

Dom:

Thank you so much, Cheryl. It really is my pleasure. Have a good one.