Atlas Copco on the map: Turkey is developing fast and Atlas Copco equipment and know-how is the common denominator for contractors at several worksites.

That's how pleased the company, KIBSAS, is with the Atlas Copco ROC D7 drill rig it purchased recently to meet the rising demands from the aggregate and concrete industries.

The company has been working for many years in two quarries - one near Istanbul, the other at Bursa, further to the south. Thanks to the new equipment, large savings are now being realised.
Says chief executive Osman Üçüncü: "We used to work with two surface crawler rigs, one hydraulic and one pneumatic, to meet our production targets at both sites. But that all changed when we bought the Atlas Copco ROC D7. The rig is equipped with the COP 1838 rock drill and the Secoroc FI 51 drillstring with a 102 mm drop centre ballistic bit. The average bench height is 12 metres.

Newcomer to the site: The ROC D7-11 surface crawler rig has halved the cost of drilling and cut the consumption of bits, shanks and rods.

Happy with the ROC D7: From left, service technician Murat Ykican, Atlas Copco Manager Turgay Ozan and Osman Üçüncü, CEO of KIBSAS.

"The cost of drilling has been halved and the rig's high performance has also resulted in a sharp decrease in the consumption of accessories, such as bits, shanks and rods."

Production from the two quarries is around 4.5 mt per year and the company plans to increase production of cement and aggregates by about 12 per cent over the next year. Currently, 600,000 m3 of aggregate goes to the concrete plant and the remainder is sold to road contractors.

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Super highway beside the sea

Where the road will run: One of the picturesque views that travellers will enjoy when the new highway is in use.

The 500 km Black Sea Highway is the first part of a scheme which could eventually link up with the Trans-European road system, making it possible for trucks to drive from Georgia to northern Europe in just four days.

The road starts at Hopa on the Georgian border and will run 500 km along the coast to Samsun, where it will join up with another road scheme which will go inland to Ankara to link up with existing roads going westward.

The first 18 km of this super highway, complete with 3 km tunnels, was opened last October. The remaining stretches under construction are being built mainly on land reclaimed from the sea. For the past 10 years, boulders from inland quarries have been excavated and transported to the coast to form the road's embankments.

The first tunnels

Turkish contractor Cengiz is building 120 km of the highway and was responsible for the first tunnels constructed at Hopa. Excavation was carried out with hand-held Atlas Copco BBC 16 pneumatic rock drills from 1995 to 1999 with a crew of eight drillers, working at two faces using portable compressors.

Some 90 km along the coast from Georgia, Cengiz has also started work on the twin-tube Cayeli tunnels, which are 1.06 km long on the sea side and 1.36 km on the land side. The contractor will also construct two 500m tunnels at a site 10 kilometres to the east.

Flashback: During a seminar on Modern Trends in Tunnelling, held last year at Atlas Copco in Turkey, delegates from various Turkish construction and mining companies admire one of the two Rocket Boomer L2 D rigs prior to delivery to the Cengiz Group for the Black Sea Highway project.

Simply the best: That's the site manager's verdict on the Rocket Boomer L2 D rigs working in the twin-tube Cayeli tunnels.

The Rocket Boomer, which is equipped with COP 1838 rock drills, has an operating height of 3 m - but this can be reduced to 2.35 m by lowering the protective roof. It can drill cross-sections up to 90 m2, has an anti-jamming function, separate pumps for percussion, damping and positioning, and rotation gives independent control and maximum output in each cycle.

Praise for rigs

Access to the central section of the tunnels was achieved by ramping up from the adjacent highway and excavating along a short valley watercourse, which was then culverted from waterfall to sea prior to establishing the portals. Waste rock from the tunnels is trucked to the nearest rockfill site along the reclamation project.

The access is 600m from the east portals along the straight tunnel alignment. Top headings of 60 m2 will be followed by 38 m2 benches. The face round is 120 holes of between 1.5 and 2.5m, which are charged with dynamite primed with millisecond-delay detonators. All drilling is handled by the Rocket Boomer rigs - including rock bolting.

Sabahattin Erten, Cengiz's site manager, describes the Rocket Boomer rig as "the best machine available."

Asim Cengiz, Vice Chairman of the Cengiz Group and project manager for the Black Sea Highway tunnels, adds: "Atlas Copco served us well on the first tunnels and we expect no less on the ones currently under construction."

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Where success is copper-bottomed