Maple Grove Enterprises has been working with Blue Seal Feeds for years, providing millwright services to their plants from Arcade to Watertown. When Blue Seal recently sold their Watertown NY plant to Afgritech, we were there to aid the transition.
According to Afgritech’s plant manager Harold Rozanski, the new mill is a state-of-the-art, computerized manufacturing facility. They will use a new patented process used for the first time in the United States.
But the mill as purchased was in rough shape, requiring a combination of demolition, rebuilding, and installation of new equipment. The silos and containment tanks were corroded, and had to be either scrapped or rebuilt. Old equipment that was no longer needed—hammer and pellett mills, feeders and a pneumatic conveying system—were removed to make way for new processing equipment shipped in from Germany.
Maple Grove Enterprises worked in conjunction with Mill Technology from Muncy, PA. They did all the design work and drawings for the work done by our crew.
To remove the old equipment, we removed the roof and lifted the equipment through the gap. Once the equipment was cleared out, we got started on transforming the old mill into the state-of-the-art facility required by Afgritech.
Some of the equipment rebuilding work was performed in our Arcade shop, including fabricating and painting bucket elevator boots and trunking, a scale hopper, and all the structural steel.
Most of the work, of course, was done on site. We inspected, repaired, cleaned, and painted the remaining silos and removed two concrete floors to make room for the new structural steel mini-tower with diamond plate floors. In the truck load-out area, we removed the molasses blender, fines collection system, and hopper and replaced the gathering conveyor. We also installed new air-operated gates, cleaned and painted original load-out bins, and installed a new cross conveyor to the pelleting leg.
We cleaned and painted all the ductworks, stairs, catwalks, and structural steel in the building, as well as the concrete floors. Click on the photos below for before and after shots of the work. Maple Grove Enterprises is proud of the job and pleased to work with a company that will contribute so much to the dairy industry in New York and throughout the U.S.!
