MacLean Brand Guidelines: An Ontario Family Firm Built on the Scissor Bolter

A mining engineer strikes out on his own.

MacLean Engineering was founded in 1973 by Don MacLean, a mining engineer, Northern Ontario Business reported in 2014 and Canadian Mining Journal in 2018. The company’s own account says he studied mining engineering at McGill, worked underground as a shift boss for International Nickel (Inco) at its Levack site near Sudbury, moved into equipment sales with Ingersoll Rand in 1967 and then developed underground mining equipment for JMG Engineering in Thornbury, Ontario, before forming his own business.

The beginnings were modest. The company says it started out retrofitting farm tractors in an apple-orchard barn in southern Georgian Bay, Ontario. Its early niche was block caving, an underground bulk-mining method. Northern Ontario Business reported that Don MacLean developed drawpoint obstruction-clearance machines for block-caving mines, including blockhole jumbos, in the late 1970s, and in the 1990s led work on high-reach and medium-reach rigs and the Ro-Bust, which broke boulders lodged in drawpoints with high-pressure water impulses, using technology licensed from the South African manufacturer Denel. The company now describes that problem-solving habit as MacLean “Application Intelligence,” engineered solutions for a specific job in a real underground setting, and traces it to its start-up years in the 1970s and 1980s.

That work brought recognition. In 2014 Don MacLean was an inaugural inductee of the International Mining Technology Hall of Fame, in its underground production category, at a gala in Utah, Northern Ontario Business reported; the company says he also received the CIM Mining Safety Leadership Medal in 2023.

Bolters, boom trucks and batteries.

MacLean does not try to build everything that goes underground. A company product manager told Resource World that it does not make big haul trucks or scoops, but covers most of the other work in a mine. One of its machines is the scissor bolter, used for ground support; the company says more than 500 have been built since their introduction in Canada in the early 1990s, and Canadian Mining Journal counted more than 1,200 machines delivered by 2018, including more than 500 bolters. Today the website groups the range into roof bolters and scalers, utility vehicles, secondary reduction, shotcrete and concrete transport, and explosive charging; Canadian Mining Journal named boom trucks, scissor lifts and ANFO and emulsion loaders among the machines.

The bigger shift has been electrification. Canadian Mining Journal reported in September 2018 that MacLean had launched a battery-electric line in 2016 with an electric version of its scissor bolter, followed by vehicles such as the BT3 boom truck, while most of the machines it made were still diesel-powered. Resource World reported that the company had sold a battery unit to Vale in the Sudbury basin. The company’s website now counts more than 130 battery-electric vehicles commissioned, describes remote-control and telemetry systems, and presents a programme it calls Real Zero 2040. It has also added a surface-mining division, with a battery-electric grader called the GR8, as well as municipal and environmental divisions, though Canadian Mining Journal noted in 2018 that mining made up the bulk of its sales.

Demand has at times outrun the plants. At the end of June 2018, Canadian Mining Journal reported, MacLean could build 14 to 16 units a month across its facilities and was already booking orders into the following year, with a “We’re hiring!” sign outside the Collingwood office. Resource World described a suite of equipment the company calls ore flow facilitation, used mainly in block caving to clear high hang-ups and reduce oversize rock after blasting.

Design and documentation.

Mining equipment makers sell machines that most people never see at work. Their customers are mine operators, tunnelling contractors and quarry owners, and the machines spend their working lives underground or at the far end of an open pit. So the trade’s imagery tends to bring the site to the viewer: a drill rig in a floodlit tunnel, its booms reaching towards a rock face; a loader or haul truck in yellow or orange, picked out against grey stone; the beam of a headlamp in the dark.

Above ground, the favoured view is from high up. Photographs of open-pit mines show stepped benches cut into the earth, with trucks and drill rigs reduced to small bright shapes on the terraces. Underground pictures work the other way, close and cramped, with the machine filling the frame and the rock wall just beyond it.

Much of the rest of the visual language comes from proving that the machines work. Makers show equipment in test mines and at customer sites, and show it to the trade at fairs such as MINExpo International, which is organised by the US National Mining Association and describes itself as the industry’s largest global mining event; its next edition is scheduled for September 2028. Stands at such fairs put full-size rigs and loaders on display, often alongside screens showing the same machines below ground.

Behind the pictures sit very different companies. Some are divisions or spin-offs of large listed engineering groups; others are family firms or privately owned specialists built around one process, such as spraying concrete or charging explosives. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Family-run, from Collingwood.

MacLean has stayed in the family. Don MacLean’s son Kevin MacLean has been president since 2005, Canadian Mining Journal reported in 2018, and the company now names him as chief executive; Resource World described MacLean Engineering as family-owned. The legal name on its website is MacLean Engineering & Marketing Co. Limited, and the company marked its 50th anniversary in 2023.

Its base is the southern Georgian Bay area of Ontario. Northern Ontario Business placed the corporate headquarters in Collingwood in 2014, with design and manufacturing in Collingwood and Owen Sound; by 2018 Canadian Mining Journal also listed a plant in Barrie, and a hiring notice on the company’s website now names North Bay, Sudbury, Barrie, Collingwood and Owen Sound. Abroad it has branches in the United States, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and Australia, the company says. It calls itself “the world’s largest Canadian-based manufacturer of underground mining equipment,” and its headcount has grown from about 650 in 2018, by Canadian Mining Journal’s count, to some 1,300 by the company’s own figures. Its values statement, “The MacLean Way,” lists safety, accountability, agility and integrity, and gives its purpose as connecting “people with ideas to enhance life underground and above.”

For a design guide, MacLean shows how a founder’s surname and one specialist machine, the scissor bolter, can anchor a family company’s identity as it moves from diesel to battery power. Compare Sandvik and Epiroc, two Swedish makers of underground mining equipment. For this guide we use a charcoal, a muted amber and a slate blue with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep MacLean’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.