The short answer
For a single highway package of two to three years, buying a crusher plant rarely pays unless the next package for it is already in hand. Dry hire gives you the machine and leaves you the operators, the spares and the output risk. A per-tonne crushing contract leaves the plant, crew, wear parts and breakdowns with the contractor, and you pay for weighed material only.
A highway contractor needs graded stone for most of the life of a package. There are three ways to get it made on site, and they differ less in price than in who is holding the problem on the night something breaks.
01The three arrangements
| Buy the plant | Dry hire | Per-tonne contract | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capital tied up | Full cost of plant and erection | Deposit and mobilisation | None, or a mobilisation advance |
| Who operates | Your crew | Your crew | Contractor's crew |
| Wear parts and spares | Yours | Usually yours | Contractor's |
| A breakdown costs | You, twice: the repair and the lost tonnes | You the lost tonnes, and an argument over the repair | The contractor |
| What you pay | Everything, as it falls due | Rent per month, often with minimum hours | A rate per tonne of finished stone |
| Output risk | Yours | Yours | Contractor's, down to a minimum offtake |
| At the end of the package | An asset to move, park or sell | Hand back | Contractor removes it |
02What owning a plant really includes
The quotation from the manufacturer is the smallest part of it. Around the machine you need foundations and structure, a power connection or generators, a weighbridge, loaders to feed and to stockpile, a workshop, a store of liners and belts, and people who have run this make of plant before. You also need the consents that let a crusher stand and run, which is a subject on its own in setting up a stone crusher plant.
Then the package ends. The plant is now a pile of steel that earns nothing until it is dismantled, trailered and erected again, and the trained crew either stays on the payroll with nothing to run or leaves. Ownership pays when there is a queue of work in the same region, or a lease of your own with years of rock in it. On a one-off package it is capital parked in a machine that works for thirty months and waits for the next thirty.
03What dry hire leaves with you
Hiring solves the capital and nothing else. The lessor delivers a plant and a rent invoice. Production is yours to organise: operators, an electrician and a fitter, a spares store, and a routine for changing liners before they fail. When the plant stops, the rent does not.
There is a second risk that surfaces later. A hired plant belongs to someone whose interest is the rent, and if a better hire appears elsewhere the renewal conversation gets difficult at exactly the wrong month. Read the term, the notice period and the minimum-hours clause before signing.
04What a per-tonne contract moves across
Here the contractor brings the plant, erects it, mans it, maintains it and is paid only for stone that crosses the weighbridge inside the grading. The risks that belonged to you under the other two arrangements now belong to a firm whose only income from your site is finished tonnes. A stopped plant earns it nothing, so its interest and yours point the same way.
It is not free of obligations. Most per-tonne contracts carry a minimum monthly offtake, because the contractor has committed a plant and a crew to you and cannot let them stand. If your laying programme stalls you will be holding stock or paying for tonnes not yet taken. Settle that figure honestly at the start, along with who supplies the rock, the power and the land. The items that sit inside and outside the figure are listed in crushing rate per tonne.
05When buying is the right answer
- You hold a quarry lease with many years of reserve and a market around it.
- Three or more packages in one region are already awarded, so the plant moves a short distance each time and the crew stays together.
- You already employ plant people and a maintenance team who are short of work.
- The stone is your product, not an input to your product.
If none of those applies, the question is only which of the other two risks you want. Contractors who answer that by hiring a plant to save a few rupees a tonne usually find out in the first monsoon what the saving bought.