The drivers who surveyed the South of Landes, a part of the A63 or the Mimizan sector at night on October 8 and 9, could not have missed it. An exceptional convoy of several hundred tonnes, transporting three pieces of a cylinder almost 8 meters in diameter (7.9) intended for the Gascogne Papier factory in Mimizan.
Assembled, these pieces will quite simply constitute the largest steel friction cylinder in the world. “We may be beaten one day, but for now it is unique,” smiles Didier Puig, head of the paper manufacturer’s design office.
The convoy seen on the Landes roads was in reality only the last stage of a journey lasting several months across Europe. After leaving a Hungarian factory, the parts traveled on the Danube, then the Rhine, before embarking from the port of Rotterdam towards Bayonne, where they arrived in July 2024.
And it’s not over: it will take another six months to assemble the three pieces, which constitute only part of an extraordinary machine.
Late
Their arrival in Mimizan still marks an important step in the pharaonic project in which the Gascogne group has embarked in 2023, with the purchase from the Austrian manufacturer Andriz of a latest generation paper machine, capable of itself replacing three of the four currently in service at Mimizan, and to produce 125,000 tonnes of paper per year.
Cost of the operation? 220 million euros, without forgetting the significant logistical challenge, since the construction of a new building to accommodate the machine is necessary. It is also this part of the project which has fallen behind schedule and will delay the commissioning of the new equipment. The building should be ready by the end of 2025. Until the summer of 2026, the piping, the electrical part, and “all the small ancillary machines” will still need to be refined.
At the peak of activity, nearly 200 people should be mobilized for assembly. Commissioning is planned “in the summer of 2026”, estimates Didier Puig, i.e. a delay of a big year which does not impact Gascogne’s production capacities, but therefore defers the expected gains from this qualified investment. both “logical and historical” for the group by its president, Dominique Coutière.
Assembling the machine will take several months.
Accrophoto 40
