The first seeds for the Buxplug concept were sown in Sean Buxton’s mind in the early 1990s when, as a young mining engineer, he witnessed first-hand the difficulties miners were having in using the traditional method of manual cable bolt grouting, a “haphazard” approach that typically involves stuffing some form of wadding into the cable bolt hole and can become quite messy and time-consuming.

With a desire to provide the industry with a more efficient alternative, Buxton said the idea lay dormant in his head for almost another decade before he received a surge of inspiration – “It all came back to me; I thought I can do something here” – and put pen to paper to finalise a design.

Simple in construction, the Buxplug fits firmly over the drilled cable bolt hole with sleeves to accommodate the cable bolt/s and holes for the breather tube and grout hose. The beauty of the product, according to Buxton, is that it enables fast and easy one-pass installation.

With the design bedded down, he formed his own company, Buxton Innicon, primarily for the purpose of marketing the Buxplug, and having funded all the development activities himself, bought the product to commercialisation in November 2003.

Despite the climate in the Australian mining industry already having taken a turn for the better when the Buxplug first became available, Buxton said it was still a fight to gain acceptance for the product, mainly because mines were too busy focusing on production to trial something new or simply wanted to stick to tried-and-true methods.

However, this is no longer a problem. Taking on board feedback from customers who were willing to experiment with the Buxplug from an early stage, he said the design has been refined to the point where it is “much more improved than the original”; user confidence has increased as a result; and subsequently, the company has seen a significant boost in sales.

“What you see today is the culmination of all the feedback we’ve received and we’ve now got a really good product,” Buxton said. “They are subtle changes [that we’ve made], but they are all things that make it better.

“We’ve now got better sealing around the hole, better sealing around the grout and breather tubes, and it’s also been beefed up a bit so that it’s more robust during installation.

“New products require time to learn how to use properly and that’s what we’ve found. The guys that have used it a second time round have grown a lot more confident with the product.”

So far, the main markets for the Buxplug have been the metalliferous mining sectors in Western Australia and Queensland and the underground coal sector in New South Wales and Queensland, with some recent interest also coming from metalliferous mines in South Australia.

The company will likely look to market the product overseas for the first time this year, as it is in the process of applying for international patents for the Buxplug.

Australia’s Mining Monthly