After a long journey, which started from the moment we took the plane in Santiago de Chile and after making different connections, we were able to arrive in the capital of Bulgaria (Sofia).
Once in Sofia, we encountered a new law adopted by Bulgaria, which requires an international licence to rent a car, and this left us without our main alternative to get to Plodvip (the city where the KCM company is located). Being pressured by this situation, as we had the meeting the next day, we opted to take a train near the airport, which after a few hours allowed us to finally reach Plodvip.
We arrived at the foundry on Monday 02 September around 10:00 AM.
We were met by Maria (procurement) and while we were explaining how we got to Plovdiv, Georgi (foundry manager) arrived.
We were allowed to go on a tour of the plant to see how their process worked.
KCM processes zinc, lead and precious metals. For this they use lead concentrate and recycling of all kinds of materials, especially batteries.
After the visit to the plant where it is necessary to point out that it is impeccable (you can tell that they are very neat to work with), we had a meeting in Georgi's office, where he explained the process in general and gave us more technical details of the tapping area and the oven in particular.
Also, we were invited to a nice lunch with Georgi in the KCM food court and after that we went to a meeting room, to do the training of the operators in the use of Trefimet thermal lances.
In general, everyone was very aware of the dangers of using a more powerful tool such as the Trefimet thermal lance and the benefits it offers over the ordinary pipe, to name but a few: faster to do the job, more control by the operator and less generation of sparks, fumes and polluting gases.
Tuesday 03/09.
Again we were received very warmly, both by the operators and the bosses.
Georgi met us in the lobby of the administration building, we had a brief safety induction and immediately went to get our personal protection equipment, which allowed us to enter the plant, as we wanted to see in situ the first tapping of the Bach (which was cold, as it had been stopped for about 13 hours).
The tests with our thermal lances were a success, they really liked our connection system with our FCT quick coupling. The thermal lances fulfilled a great performance, but to be measured and according to the word of the operators and Georgi, it is only a first impression, that they should test it more, to grow in the learning curve and control of this "new tool".
Finally, we did a second test (opening N° 2 of the day in the metal passage). This second test was different, a modification was made to the tapping to make it more complex (increasing the difficulty of opening for the Trefimet thermal lance compared to other normal openings with pipe). Even so, this second opening was quite fast and used only a few metres of the thermal lance.
Finally, we went to Georgi's boss's office to say goodbye to him and his people.
We believe that this farewell is more of a goodbye than a farewell.
As Trefimet team we were very happy with the visit and the warmth of the KCM people, as well as the results of the tests with our thermal lances and the good reception to the training sessions.
We look forward to returning to Plodvip.....