Man-riding & conveyances – compliant personnel access and shaft conveyances

Standing up compliant personnel access at a shaft normally means building a permanent headframe and winder. Our solution delivers the same capability from a mobile, self-erecting unit: an articulated man-riding headgear paired with a man-riding conveyance cage, engineered together so a mine can move people safely up and down a shaft without permanent construction and move the system between shafts on a single transport load.

And because man-riding and material conveyance share the same shaft, headgear and engineering. We cover the conveyances too, man-riding cages, kibbles and skips, with their bridles, guides and running gear, designed and built to the same mine-shaft and man-riding standards. See our kibbles, skips & man-riding conveyances.

How it goes together

• Articulated man-riding headgear – a dedicated, double-braked man-riding winch, head sheave on the boom crown and fine boom adjustment over the shaft. Self-erecting on its own hydraulics, so no tall site crane and no working at height to rig it.
• Man-riding conveyance cage – a fully meshed, guarded, multi-deck cage sized to the shaft, with down-shaft power via the constant-tension cable reeler. Drawn from our own conveyance design pedigree – man-riding cages and ore skips with bridles, detaching-hook interfaces and guide running gear.
• Redundant recovery, by design – controlled emergency lowering is deliberately avoided; recovery is by a fully redundant hoisting path (an identical second winch and wire), with a supervised, keyed recovery mode on backup power. Safer than relying on a single controlled descent.
• Full safety architecture – over-wind and top-out protection, interlocked shaft doors and gated access, dual-channel emergency stops, fail-safe braking on power loss and interlocked wireless control with manual hydraulic override.

Compliant, and genuinely mobile

The system is engineered to the recognised mine-shaft, lifting and machinery standards, mine-shaft structures (headframes, conveyances and rope guides), lifting-equipment regulations, the machinery directive and CE marking, functional-safety control standards, wire-rope safety standards (with the higher safety factors man-riding demands) and the applicable national mine-safety and man-riding regulations, so the man-riding duty is compliant, not improvised. And it is built to move: road-transportable within unescorted width, modular by quick-coupler, with the heaviest mobilisation lift kept within standard site plant, so one unit can service multiple shafts.

Man-riding load cases, hoist speeds and cage sizing are engineered per shaft and confirmed at enquiry.