Crushing and screening plant finance for quarries and contract crushers

Real numbers set the shape of the deal, so start there. A tracked scalping screen typically runs A$300,000 to A$550,000, and a triple-deck inclined screen A$400,000 to A$700,000. A mid-size tracked jaw crusher generally sits between A$700,000 and A$1.1 million, a tracked cone between A$800,000 and A$1.3 million, and an impactor between A$600,000 and A$1.2 million. Stackers and transfer conveyors add roughly A$80,000 to A$200,000 each. A matched mobile crush-and-screen train — primary jaw, secondary cone, screen and conveyors bought to work together — commonly lands between A$1.2 million and A$2.5 million, while a fixed installation can push past A$3 million once civil works and electrical are counted.

How that total is financed deserves a deliberate decision. A train can go on one facility with a single settlement and one repayment, which is clean and usually quickest to approve. Financing each machine on its own schedule takes marginally more paperwork but leaves you able to sell or trade one unit without unwinding the whole arrangement — genuinely useful when the cone gets upgraded three years before the screens do. Staged delivery raises the same question again, since units arriving months apart often settle separately anyway. A specialist should walk you through both structures against your fleet plan rather than defaulting to whichever lodges faster.

Age tells a lender surprisingly little about a crusher. Load matters far more, which is why the number worth quoting is crushing hours rather than engine hours — a machine showing 6,000 engine hours with 2,500 under load is a different asset from one fed hard for the same period. Wear here is concentrated and well documented: jaw dies, cone mantles and concaves, impactor blow bars and screen media all have known service lives, and the replacement history is effectively a maintenance log written in parts invoices. Produce that folder. On used plant it frequently does more for the assessment than the year of manufacture ever will.

Rebuild status is the other lever. A relined cone or a machine with a recent chamber rebuild can present better than a lower-hour unit with nothing recorded, provided the work is invoiced and the components identified. Lenders then weigh brand recognition and parts backup, because plant that can be supported anywhere holds value everywhere. Imported used machines are financed regularly but read more closely — proof of ownership, a clear PPSR search, Australian compliance, and evidence that parts and service genuinely exist here. An independent inspection at these values is worth commissioning rather than resisting; a clean report protects your capital first and often improves the structure offered.

The lender's fallback is selling the plant, so how readily it moves shapes everything. Tracked mobile crushers and screens have a genuinely national second-hand market with an export market behind it — a tidy tracked jaw finds buyers in every state and several countries, which reads as strong security. Wheeled and skid-mounted semi-mobile units sit a step behind that. Fixed and static plant is the outlier: once it is bolted to foundations, wired into site power and integrated with bins and conveyors, removal is expensive and the resale market thins dramatically. Expect a larger deposit, a shorter term, or a different structure entirely where the plant is being installed rather than tracked onto site.

That gradient runs straight into the balloon conversation. Earthmoving assets often support generous balloons because their resale curves are shallow and predictable. Crushing plant depreciates against wear as much as time, and a machine that has processed abrasive material hard for four years may not meet an optimistic residual. Lenders reflect that with more conservative balloons than you might see on an excavator of similar value, and some prefer none at all on high-wear units. That is not an argument against a balloon — it is an argument for setting one you can genuinely refinance or pay out, rather than one that flatters this month's figure.

The application is really a utilisation case. Contract crushers are paid per tonne, so the persuasive document is a schedule of committed tonnages with a rate against them — a quarry supply agreement, a state road authority project, a subdivision's pavement material, or repeat work for an established civil client. Concentration with one customer gets noted rather than treated as fatal, particularly where the relationship has years of history behind it. Lenders also probe what follows the current job: plant financed over five years should not rest on a nine-month contract, and operators who can point to a pipeline or a hire market for spare capacity fare materially better.

Seasonality deserves the same honesty. Across northern Queensland, the Territory and the Kimberley a wet season can take months out of the year; elsewhere the Christmas civil shutdown and wet winters do a smaller version of the same thing. Structured or seasonal repayment profiles exist in general terms for exactly this pattern, and a term that assumes twelve earning months where you realistically get nine is a structure that will hurt. Budget consumables separately, too — mantles, dies, blow bars and screen media are a cost per tonne rather than capital, and sit better against cash flow or a working capital facility than inside the equipment loan.

New crushing and screening plant is frequently built to order overseas, and lead times of six to twelve months are ordinary. That creates a sequencing problem buyers tend to discover late: the manufacturer wants a deposit at order, while most lenders fund on delivery and commissioning rather than against a purchase order. The deposit therefore usually comes out of your own cash and stays there for the better part of a year. Plan for it deliberately. Pre-approvals that hold while the build progresses, progress-payment arrangements where a lender offers them, and settlement timed to arrival rather than to the shipping estimate all take pressure off that gap.

Structure is where the cash-flow news improves. Under a chattel mortgage your business owns the plant from settlement, with the lender simply holding security until payout — and in general terms a GST-registered buyer may be able to claim the GST on the purchase as an input tax credit on the next BAS. On a A$550,000 machine the GST component is A$50,000 coming back into the business inside a quarter, which at these ticket sizes is a real cash-flow event rather than a rounding item. Ownership may also open depreciation options. Both depend on your entity and registration, so confirm them with your accountant before you settle the structure.