How a backyard idea grew legs, conquered civil works, and has now been scaled up after the mining giants came knocking.
If you’ve run a FlipScreen on a skid steer, loader, or excavator, you already know the feeling: you scoop up a messy pile, hit the controls, and watch the bucket do its thing – spinning, breaking up materials, and screening though material in no time.
What used to be hard yakka becomes neat, profitable efficiency. It’s simple, clever, and it works. But here’s the twist no one saw coming.
A backyard build that outgrew the backyard
Like many good Aussie inventions, the FlipScreen concept started with a simple idea in a farm shed: ‘What if a bucket could smoothly screen its own material – no trommel, no stockpile juggling, no fuss, and most of all, no shaker bucket?’ conjectured FlipScreen’s designer.
From those early sparks came a screening bucket that reshaped landscaping, demolition, civil works, scrap yards, and quarries – every part of earthmoving that deals with dirty, mixed, unpredictable material.
A bucket that turned downtime into uptime, replaced multiple machines, and kept clean fill clean and contaminated material separated? It was a no-brainer.
Noticed
As more FlipScreens rolled out around the country and worldwide – the S45s on skid steers, the WL185s on loaders, and the E55s and EX144s on excavators – something interesting started happening. It wasn’t only landscapers taking notice. The miners were watching too.
“If it works on a skid steer, what happens when we put it on a 100-tonne loader?” the miners wondered.
Mining sites have always struggled with oversize boulders causing blockages, slowing production, and burning hours of downtime while someone with a hammer on an excavator tried to work it free it at the primaries.
Mining accepted that as ‘the way it is’ until someone looked at the FlipScreen already proving itself across the landscaping sector and said, “Hang on…why don’t we screen the material before it hits the feeder?”
It was the kind of question that changes an industry, and it led to a machine that shouldn’t exist – but does.
Meet the WL3000
Calling the WL3000 a ‘bucket’ feels like calling Uluru a ‘stone’. This thing is colossal.
Unlike the rest of FlipScreen’s lineup, it’s not an attachment or a simple add-on. It’s an integrated screening system built onto the chassis of a 100-tonne mining loader.
It takes the same rotating action every landscaper knows – the same action powering an S45, BL85 or E55 – and scales it into something so huge, capable, and effective that even seasoned miners go quiet when they see it.
Key numbers
Here are a few stats on the WL3000:
• A screening area of roughly 373 square feet;
• up to 1500 tonnes per hour throughput;
• purpose-built design replacing around 32 tonnes with around 36 tonnes of engineered structure; and
• a screen designed to give the primary crusher a smooth, oversize-free feed.
It does the same as a FlipScreen on a landscaping job, except with an output that could fill a small town’s footy oval by smoko.
From cleaning soil to feeding Australia’s largest mines
The WL3000 only exists because the landscaping industry proved the FlipScreen principle works. The motion, screening-chamber design, and philosophy didn’t change from the buckets landscapers use every day.
What began as a handy way to clean topsoil, blend compost, remove rocks/concrete, and tidy material on suburban projects has now become a frontline solution on iron-ore mines, coal operations, copper and gold sites, and opal and specialty mines.
Engineering that thinks sideways
Scaling something up for mining isn’t as simple as ‘make it bigger and thicker’. Mining loads punish anything that’s merely upsized.
So FlipScreen’s engineering team – led by inventor Sam Turnbull – did what it was famous for and ignored convention.
Turnbull said: “I’ve never been much good at thinking in straight lines, but sometimes the sideways way of seeing things turns out to be the right way.”
Instead of brute force, FlipScreen used geometry – shapes inspired by everything from other mining equipment to the internal corrugations of cardboard – to deliver strength without unnecessary weight.
The result? A loader that doesn’t carry a screening attachment but becomes a colossal screening unit. It’s integrated, balanced, and purpose-built for the reality of run-of-mine (ROM) work.
The mines can’t get enough of it.
From the suburbs to the superpits
What began in the landscaping and earthmoving world has now expanded into a global industrial shift. FlipScreen’s growth has accelerated so rapidly that the company has built seven new factories across 100 acres in regional Wagga Wagga to keep up with global demand. That’s not bad for a tool that started its life cleaning debris from soil on a farm.
For landscapers, the WL3000 is more than a mining machine. It’s recognition that some of the innovative tools born in the landscaping industry are smarter, tougher, and more influential than anyone first realised.
For mining, it’s a revolution. For FlipScreen, it’s the next chapter in an Australian success story that’s still being written. For the landscaper, the contractor, and the small-business operator who slings dirt for a living, it’s something to be proud of. It was landscaping that built the foundations of FlipScreen’s DNA and proved its effectiveness. Mining just scaled it to the moon.
For more information about FlipScreen and to view the full range, head to flipscreen.net.