Farra built its first aluminium pit maintenance unit about 12 years ago. During the past five years, it had completed 12, and is about a month away from completing its first `flue wall building station", used to entirely rebuild the brick wall pit lining.
Aluminium smelters can have up to several hundred brick-lined pits where anodes are baked.
While the maintenance units were lowered into place using overhead cranes, the flue wall building system unit was positioned elsewhere in the plant and the flue walls were built, stored, and when required were lowered into the pits, Farra chief executive John Whitaker said.
"The flue wall building station has the potential to be a product of the future for us. We will be promoting this at a US trade show in a few weeks' time," he said.
While having to enter international tenders for the projects, Mr Whitaker said word of mouth and trade shows were the main areas of promotion, with some customers now approaching Farra to tender for work.
Work on two more units is under way, with orders for Rio Tinto-owned Tiwai Point near Bluff and another smelter in Argentina.
"We have got some further interest in forward orders," Mr Whitaker said.
Each unit takes about three months to design and a further three months to construct, keeping about one-third of Farra's design and fabrication team at work, with up to a dozen staff working on units at any given time.
The units will be broken down for transport in containers and sent to Australia in about four weeks and reassembled by Farra staff.
The $400,000 maintenance unit is bound for Rio Tinto's Boyne Island smelter in Queensland, and the $500,000 flue wall building station for Norwegian firm Hydro's site in Kurri Kurri in New South Wales.
"Every aluminium smelter in the world needs to have these abilities," Mr Whitaker said.
The flue wall building station had four corner-mounted drive systems, incorporating precision engineering and electronic skills, to keep the unit "precisely level" during wall building, he said.
In late October, Rio Tinto announced it was preparing to sell its aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point, in a divestment of 13 mainly aluminium-related businesses.
Rio Tinto wants to bundle its interests in six Australian, and the one New Zealand asset, into a new business unit, called Pacific Aluminium, which will be managed, and will report, separately from the Rio Tinto Alcan product group before its sale.
New Zealand Aluminium Smelters (NZAS) has a staff of 750 at the 41-year-old Tiwai smelter and is a major contributor - more than $500 million - to the local economy on revenue of about $1 billion.
NZAS is 79.36% owned by Rio Tinto Alcan and 20.64% by Japan's Sumitomo Chemical Company. Other proposed Rio asset sales include plants and smelters in France and Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom.
