The Hindu Business Line : A mineshaft to test elevators!

Recently in Helsinki The scene: surreal – a team of journalists and officials from a company, sit across a table, between them is a sumptuous spread of food and wine.

So, what’s new you may ask?

It is the location – over 200 feet below the surface of the earth in a cave-like room blasted out of solid granite and limestone. The people swaddled in quilted overcoats to protect against the damp and cold, light from electric bulbs throw shadows on the walls decorated with mining tools from the 19th century, the sound of water trickling from subterranean streams … definitely surreal.

The group of journalists were at Kone Elevators’ test facility in the limestone mines in the thickly forested area of Tytyri, about 200 km from Helsinki, on a tour organised by Finnfacts, an agency that promotes Finnish industry, and the Embassy of Finland in New Delhi.

The mines where operations began in 1897 are the deepest working limestone mines in the world, say Kone officials to the group that has just returned after a trip down one mineshaft over 1,100 feet deep (350 m), where Kone tests the elevators that it designs, elevators meant to carry people hundreds of feet up skyscrapers in modern cities.

Kone Elevators hit upon the idea of using a mineshaft when it really needed to build a tower to test its elevators. A tower over 250 metres high, it estimated, would cost about €50 million, way beyond what Kone could afford. So, if it could not travel vertically upwards, why not vertically down? It had a readymade structure in the limestone mineshafts, which it adapted for its use for €3 million.

Features of the shaft

Mr Veikko Tapola, Administration Hyvinkaa, Kone Industrial Oy, in charge of the test facility, waxes eloquent as he explains the features of the shaft – nearly 1,100 ft of guide rails that can support a 50 tonnes and a cabin load of 5 tonnes. An elevator spends up to two years in the test facility before it sees the light of day in a multi-storeyed structure.

The lift shaft, part of it with glass sides to show it off to visitors, is designed for elevators that can move up to about 17 m per second, about 61km an hour, but for now the elevators tested move at a relatively sedate pace of about 6 m a second.

Earlier, in a more corporate environment, in the airconditioned conference room at Kone’s headquarters, at Hyvinka a 30-minute drive from the test facility, Mr Matti Alahutta, President and CEO, Kone, elaborates on some of the new products that the company has lined up.

The MX100, a double-decker lift, two cabins one above the other in the same lift shaft is one such new product.

You double the carrying capacity and cut down on the number of lift shafts in a building – saving space for more paying use.

Other products

Other products include the elevator that does away with the machine room — so no more cabins on the building’s terrace; an elevator without the need for a counterweight so more cabin space in a given lift shaft; and the ecodisc drive motor that saves on power.

Kone is among the leading elevator companies in India, and among the earliest of Finland’s companies to enter the market here in the mid-1980s.

It has production facility in Chennai apart from an R&D Centre and the global software centre. India is a ‘high priority market’ for Kone, says Mr Alahutta.

“Elevators are the heart of a building,” he says, and Kone is pushing it to new heights.

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