The Rebirth and rise of the Small Scale Miner: Part II Equipment.
Now that I am done with the research into this side of the equation, I am able to write a little about it. The fact of the matter remains that there is very little equipment available for the small scale miner. There is a very large gap in equipment, either your hand loading like the old pony mines of yesteryear or you are running with millions of dollars of equipment.
While hand loading would be a viable option in the very rich mines, it is also very detrimental to work the human body that way. The lack of proper equipment also leads to unnecessary injury, and, quite often, to the death of miners.
I initially started into this by looking at the smaller mining equipment available from the current manufacturers, such as Joy and Atlas Copco. They do make equipment for narrow drifts and veins. A lot of this equipment is capable of operating in widths of 3 meters or less. However, the cost of this equipment is out of the reach of all but the most well funded small miner. The cheapest options available are either used equipment, with an unknown live expectancy or building something ad hoc to do the job.
The ad hoc equipment is quite often substandard and, all to often, becomes more dangerous than the mining process itself. Youtube is full of videos from the third world countries of children diving underwater with just a tube in their mouths for breathing air. The diving compressor is just a motor and a compressor that pulls in the motor exhaust and sends it done the tube to be breathed in by the diver.
I also looked at using construction equipment such as a skid steer underground. This brings up it's own set of problems and costs. I am not a big fan if using internal combustion engines underground due to carbon monoxide poisoning. With the IC engines, there is also the added cost of increased ventilation to dilute the carbon monoxide to safe levels. Battery powered equipment would be better, however, there are very few of those types of equipment available. Those that are available are considered specialty equipment thus having an additional cost to purchase.
Also with construction equipment underground, the life expectancy will be short as that equipment was not designed to handle the rigors of mining. There are many issues such as weight of the equipment to stresses being placed on the equipment it was not designed for.
So what are we, as small miners, to do? Do we sit around and dream of mining? Or do we learn and build what we need to maintain a safe and productive environment? I will keep researching and using my experience to tackle this problem.
