Quarry equipment finance, from the face to the stockpile

Price bands here are wide because the plant list is diverse. A tracked mobile jaw or cone typically sits between A$300,000 and A$1.5 million, a triple-deck screen or scalper toward the lower half of that band, and a wash plant with cyclones and a thickener can reach A$800,000 once installation is counted. On the mobile side, a quarry-spec wheel loader runs A$250,000 to A$700,000 and an articulated dump truck A$400,000 to A$900,000. Very few extractive purchases land under A$150,000, and the practical effect is that these deals are assessed on their own merits rather than waved through on a matrix.

Ticket size changes what a lender wants to see. Below roughly A$250,000, an established operation with clean history can often be assessed on limited financials; above that, and certainly at seven figures, expect full financials, an equipment schedule and a conversation about what the machine does to production volume. It also changes the structure worth arguing for. On a A$550,000 loader, a chattel mortgage puts the asset in your name from settlement and, for a GST-registered business, the GST component is generally claimable in full on the next BAS — roughly A$50,000 back while the repayments have barely started. Confirm the treatment with your accountant.

Age alone rarely kills a quarry deal. Lenders who know extractive plant look at where a machine sits in its component life, because that is what determines the working years left in it. On a wheel loader that means hours against engine and transmission rebuild intervals, plus bucket, pin and bushing condition. On a crusher it means the wear-parts story: mantle and concave or jaw-die hours, main-shaft and bearing history, and whether the unit has been fed material it was built for. A 12,000-hour loader with a documented powertrain rebuild often presents better than a 7,000-hour machine with no service file.

That makes the paper trail part of the asset. Service records, oil-sample reports, rebuild invoices and original supply documentation convert claims into evidence, and at these values evidence is what a credit assessor is really buying. Expect a PPSR search on any used unit and an independent inspection or valuation on higher-value or private-sale purchases — which protects your capital as much as the lender's security. Provenance matters too: a machine that has spent its life in hard rock has worked differently from one in sand and gravel, and being upfront about that history reads as competence rather than a problem.

Lenders price risk against what a machine would fetch if they ever had to sell it, and quarry plant splits sharply on that question. Wheel loaders, articulated dump trucks and excavators have deep national secondhand markets — civil contractors, other quarries and the auction houses all bid on them — so they finance readily on conventional terms and support a sensible balloon. Tracked mobile crushers and screens sit a step behind: genuinely tradeable, but into a narrower buyer pool, which usually shows up as a more conservative end-of-term position rather than a refusal.

Static installations are the different case. A fixed crushing circuit, structural conveyors, bins and a wash plant bolted to a concrete pad may be treated as improvements to the site rather than removable chattels, and lenders assess them accordingly — sometimes within a property-secured facility, sometimes with a larger contribution. Where plant is genuinely relocatable, say so and prove it, because relocatability is what preserves the asset argument. Getting that split right matters: it is often cleaner to finance the mobile fleet as equipment and treat the fixed circuit as a separate, deliberately structured piece of the funding.

Quarries are unusual in the extractive family because they run on construction and infrastructure demand rather than the commodity cycle. Aggregate, road base, sand and manufactured sand feed concrete batching, asphalt plants and civil earthworks, so the question a lender is really asking is not about commodity prices but about the local pipeline: subdivisions, road upgrades, and the freight radius that keeps your product competitive. Aggregate is heavy and low in value per tonne, so a quarry's market is measured in truck-hours rather than states — and that captive geography is a genuine strength worth spelling out in an application.

Seasonality is the counterweight. Wet months shut down faces and haul roads, some regions lose weeks to flood or fire, and a single large civil contract can compress a year's volume into two quarters. Lenders in this space understand that pattern; what they want is an operator who has structured for it, not one presenting a flat line nobody believes. Supply agreements with batching plants or civil contractors, royalty and reserve-life information, and a realistic view of remaining resource all strengthen the file. Structured or seasonally weighted repayments are available with some lenders where the pattern is documented rather than merely described.

Replacement in a quarry rarely happens at a convenient moment. Crushing circuits are changed out in planned shutdowns, imported plant arrives on a shipping schedule, and a loader that fails at the stockpile is a problem measured in tonnes per hour. Finance runs its own sequence — approval, inspection, insurance, settlement — and the two only line up if the real dates are on the table early. Tell your specialist the deadline that actually matters and the process gets built backwards from it, with approvals held live long enough to absorb the delivery slip that heavy plant almost always produces.

Multi-unit purchases deserve the same deliberation. Standing up a new pit or a second circuit might mean a crusher, a screen, a conveyor run and a loader inside six months, and running four disconnected applications wastes both time and negotiating position. One structured conversation lets the units be placed across the panel on purpose, with terms staggered so commitments do not all peak in the same quarter, and settlements sequenced so each machine starts costing money at roughly the point it starts producing revenue. At these values that is ordinary practice, not a special request.