tamrock
Gold Member
- Jan 16, 2013
- 15,475
- 31,450
- Detector(s) used
- Bounty Hunter Tracker IV
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
Before this last Christmas, I spent some time up North with an intro to my American made pneumatic jack leg drill that many a hard rock miner across the globe are oh, so familiar with. These are a few photos of some of the procedures in removing a slice of rock known as ore from deep in a mountain. I was around 5 or 6 miles from the portal where we all came in the mine. It takes an hour plus just to get in and out of the working heading of this area. It was long days and time from home. After this weekend of relax time, it'll be over and I'll be back out and about this next Monday. The 1st & 2nd pic is my drill with a factory muffler. It sucked way bad as this mine had to much moisture in their airlines and it would plug up with ice in the exhaust, causing the drill to crap-out and run poorly. 3rd pic you can see I strapped a chunk of a Hoosier Wet race tire to act as a muffler as this is a permissible means to use as a muffler by msha and the exhaust is more free and open to expel the ice particles. It runs so much better after that mod and I can see the miner is getting a bit tuckered out after a long day at hanging and bolting wire at the days end. 4th pic, is the geologist coming in to layout the ore vein. They uses lasers to mark it all out and it was kind of a neat looking lasers light display, Back when I was working in the mines they used transits, plumb bob's and a New York level to layout the advance. It's very important not to blast out anything, but the valuable ore and not dilute the excavated rock with worthless materiel, as this is what the Geo wants the miners to remove only. 5th pic is a heading all marked by the Geo to be next drilled in advance with a rig called the Jumbo Drill. 6th pic is the Jumbo Drill starting a face blast drill round. The Jumbo drill, works the same as a my drill in a rotary and percussive action with a tungsten carbide rock drill bit on the end of a drill rod, but it is an electric powered hydraulic rock drill with way more power and penetration rate in the rock over my small pneumatic drill. It take less the a minute to drill a 1-3/4 inch 10 foot deep hole in solid rock with these Hydraulic powered drills. 7th pic is an image of the type of narrow slice vein removal this mine does. They take the mill tailing's to fill the empty mined out vein and go upwards excavating a slice of rock at a time. 8th pic. Thats me. I'm digging the fact I don't need to get up and shave every day on these type sales calls. Plus I'm beaming ( with all the reflective tape on me), on how my drill ran. The miner tells me it was better then what they use now that I got rid of that stinking factory muffler.
