A field trip group from Ravenscroft's class of 2011

Thank you for visiting us at Wake Stone Corporation. 

Welcome to our education center. Please tour this site to get a better understanding of our company and what we do. Crushed stone is the foundation of our nation. This basic resource is essential for building houses, schools and hospitals. The American crushed stone industry supplies construction materials critical in building and maintaining airports, railroads and the world's safest and most efficient highway system. (Pictured above are Wake Stone employees in the center from left: Seth Miedema, David Lee, Johnny Bratton, and Jared Miedema with students from Ravenscroft School from the class of 2011.

Imagine the difference in your quality of life without — highways, paint, plastics, medicines, glass, driveways, concrete sidewalks, bridges, wallboard, vinyl, brick and stone buildings, homes, concrete block, roofing tile, asphalt shingles, minerals for agriculture — all made possible with crushed stone or minerals from crushed stone. For more interesting facts about our industry, visit our facts page.

Our tour begins at drilling; however, there are many planning and working stages we must go through before reaching this point. A few of which are:

• Our company geologist, David Lee, conducts geological surveys to test the availability of rock.
• We also need to obtain the necessary permits from local, county, state and federal agencies.
• Removal of the "overburden" (soil) to uncover the rock.
• Building of the primary and secondary plants.

Drilling and Blasting

Drills are used to drill blast holes in the rock.  After these holes have been drilled they are filled with explosive material which includes ammonium nitrate. The blast fragments the rock into sizes small enough to load and haul to the primary crusher.

Wake Stone uses modern explosives and blasting technology to start the first step in producing stone products with a unique in-house approach which focuses on safety, the environment and efficiency. Each bore hole is electronically detonated to produce a well controlled blast.

Hauling

After the blast, shovels and loaders begin there job. Here, a shovel takes this newly broken rock from the "muck pile" and loads it into pit haul trucks.

After being loaded, the pit trucks transport the rock along the haul road to the primary plant.  These pit trucks can haul 35 to 55 tons in one trip.

Crushing and Conveying

The rock is dumped into the primary crusher. Primary crushers are designed to crush large pieces of rock 1 to 4 feet in diameter into pieces approximately 5 to 6 inches in diameter.

Here is a picture of our entire primary crushing system. Starting from the jaw dump and ending at the surge pile at the top of the picture. After going through the primary crusher, the rock is transported by conveyer to a "surge" pile. (pictured at the top)

The surge pile (on the left) is the transition between the primary and secondary components of the quarry. From the surge pile the rock is again conveyed through a tunnel from the bottom of the pile to secondary crushing stations.

At the secondary plant, the rock is recrushed and sized (sifted) through a series of screens to produce varying sizes of rock products. Most plants make 5-6 products simultaneously. Larger plants can produce 800,000+ tons of stone per year and have third and fourth crushing stations.

Stockpiling

After leaving the crushing station, the rock is conveyed to numerous stockpiles. Each stockpile contains a finished product of   particular size and gradation specification.

Loading and Weighing

The customer's truck is loaded with the finished product by a wheel loader. The customer proceeds to the scales for weighing.

Ticketing

The customer picks up a scale ticket from the weighmaster and is on the way to the jobsite. The average length of time the customer is in the plant picking up a load of crushed stone, weighing and ticketing is 6 minutes!