About Mining for Opals in Outback Australia, Coober Pedy, Part-7

Has taken us 12 years to get this, will make the mining a lot easier for me in the future, I now know that that the front floor cutters are in bad shape and need extensive repairs down to them, I paid for it before I went on Holidays at the end of January just in case I went into the money and then I would not have it when I got back, when I got back I picked it up and took it to Ross Chatfield's yard, where I had it lifted of the trailer so I could start work on it.

Took me about 8 months to fix it and get it underground to try it out, little did I know at the time when I bought it how things were about to change in the mining industry, explosives have since gone up more that 50%, fuel has also gone up as you all know, but now I am fuel reliant using this machine so that affected me, but the government altered how we buy and store explosives now due to the Over Kill on this Terrorist Threat getting hold of explosives, so now I cannot buy or store any explosives on my property as I do not fit the criteria any more, so I am lucky that I am now a Tunnel Machine miner and do not need to use the explosives much anymore, only when I move claims and need to open up again which is not to often thankfully, if I was still a hand miner I would have probably quit and moved on.

Now there are fewer miners, doing any mining here in Coober Pedy due to the expensive's of it all, a lot can not afford it now, so there is less opal coming out of Coober Pedy due to this, its not that there is no opal around, but we all have out moments finding opal, I personal have had 3 friends get out of the mining, selling up there equipment, but there have been a lot more that I know of, if it was not for the support of my wife Patricia in the past I would not be here as she is a worker, a real good worker and at 64 is on her last legs and I am hoping that she can fully retire next year, the mining for 2006 has been supported by this web site and I will be building it up with more opal shops in 2007 so I have a lot of hard work in front of me, eventually the web site will take over from the mining when I retire from it, but as to when that might be I have no idea right now.

Here is my friend Boro, who was nice enough to come and lift the front of the machine off the ground with his truck so I could put a mining peg under the front of the tracks so I could keep the front floor cutters of the ground and enable me to get the unit off the machine for repairs, turns out this machine weighs in at a dead 2 tons, not heavy as far as tunnel machine's go, but heavy for a round one and this machine having the front floor cutters is the only one of its kind in Coober Pedy and the reason that I bought it.

All round tunnel machines except this one use some of the dirt from the face to crawl on losing some of the height in the drive, so if they could cut six foot in diameter thy would end up with around 5 foot or lees in head room and this was no good for me as I do not like to stop while working or walking up and down the drives, with this machine when it is working I will be able to stand up and not bend over.

One of the first things I had to do was to get rind of this rubbish at the rear of the machine so I could work behind it with some sort of ease, I have no idea why the guy who built it made it big and ugly here just to lift it and have things sticking out so you can hurt yourself on them if you catch them when moving around at the rear of the machine, so it has to go along with a few other things, as I have no experience in there machines I am feeling my way a little here but as I am a Fitter and Turner by Trade I have some experience in how a machine should operate and I have in the past when I was younger operated a few machine's with Hydralic and Air controls, there is also a plug socket here that I am going to move out of the way for ease of use and I have another idea for lifting the machine which is a lot better than this, the main electric control box will stay where it is, along with the Hydralic controls, but I will have to modify the control handles a little again for ease of use and to get at, as right now they are some what hidden for view.

Here I have cut the rubbish off and removed the plug socket which I will move up the front of the machine later on the left hand side where it will be out of the way, now to clean all this up with the grinder and put a coat of anti rust paint on it, then start the modifications in that area, bit to do yet, you can see the new cable on the ground on left of photo, there was none with the machine nor plugs (3) which I also had to buy at a cost of $2,500.00, also I needed a generator that was big enough to run these electric motors.

Here is my Generator, a second hand one out of Melbourne, it is 55 KVA in size, I also got the cable and 3 plugs from this company as well, now to wait until they can get it off the truck and my friend Boro will pick it up with his truck and deliver it to Ross's for me, where it will sit until I can get to bring in my blower and get it fitted on there, so I have a lot of work to do yet and as I work by my self will take a bit longer, but it will get done how I want it and that is the main thing, hard to get other people to do what you want even if you pay them so better I do it myself.

This truck belongs to the Miners store and the generator came from Melbourne to Adelaide on another truck and was put on this truck to get here and I am happy to say that it arrived with only a small dent in the rocker cover due to the people who packed it Melbourne where I bought it from by placing a muffler right on top that I did not require anyway, so all in all I was happy with the service, there was also a fuel tank that came with it and that is on the truck somewhere.

You can see that it is quite a big unit, even if you did not understand what 55 KVA meant, it puts out a lot of power and this unit weighs in at 1.3 tons, so now it is about to be put on Boro's truck and delivered to Ross's yard where he will unload it in front of the tunnel machine and will stay there after I have unwrapped it and inspected it and then covered it up again with a tarp for about 3 months until I am ready to mount it on the blower as I am not even close to that part yet.

I had to get a local Electrician to come and wire these plugs and sockets in the generator for me and it did not have anything on it, generators do not come with any of this as people use them for different needs and require a different set up that me, so we have to put our own on, always costs involved no matter what you do in this game, not cheap setting up a Tunnel Machine, so here we have the big 3 phase socket for the tunnel machine cable, 2 safety cut out switches, 1 for the 3 phase and one for 240V which is what I will run the lights off underground and later I myself installed another single 240 plug which by passed the safety cut out switch which would be for the winch, so if the anything happened underground to the lights that threw this switch out, I would not have to climb the ladders and this did happen at one point when I got going, I dropped a light underground and it threw out this switch, but was able to use the winch to come up and throw the switch back in, my friend Boro told me to do this, mind you I did not do it here but some time later on the field when I was in action mining and I finally got round to it.

This Greek electrician turned out to be pretty useless as it turned out, cost me more money later on having to get his work redone and 2 plugs repaired because of his incompetence, but I was not to know that when I got the job done and he has now left the town and good riddance say I, paid him top dollar as well for the job, the 2 UDL Switches (2 top left) that he got and installed did not last long either, I still believe that he sold me tow old units and not new ones, now I have got 2 new ones myself and personally installed them as all I had to do was undo the wires and change the units over, both did not pack in at the same time but about 4 weeks apart after about 3 months of being installed and these units normally last for years.

Now the day has come for me to mount the generator on the blower, first of all I was lucky that I have enough room on the blower truck to be able to mount this generator, I had made measurements before it got here as I knew the dimensions of the generator and it was 6 inches longer that the width of the truck, so that meant having a 3 inch overhang on each side and that was not a problem for me after all it is only a working truck on the opal fields and I had enough room for the width, but had to cut some steel off in front of the radiator for the blower's Perkins diesel engine so again it all worked out real good for me in every way.

Then I had to get up and unbolt the tin for the roof, move a piece of timber out of the way and I was ready for the crane to come and lift in on for me and here it is doing just that, once I have this in place with some pieces of rubber under the mounting pads, I have to drill a couple of holes and put bolts in to help stop it sliding out of place when I move the blower around not that is should with it weight but better to be safe than sorry, to heavy to try and move by hand.

The tunnel machine is just about finished at the back, need to give it a lick of paint to make it look good, for a while anyway.

Here we are just about done, now to drill the holes and bolt it in place only 2 required, I have already mounted the fuel tank up high as you can see, I had to make special brackets for this, after I have put the roof back in place I have to run new fuel lines down to the generator and the Perkins engine and also for the return fuel line, then when all that is done I have to bleed the systems and get the engines running and test out the generator, I will also be able for the first time be able to try put the tunnel machine and see everything running on it, see if there is anything else I need to fix, will be able see if there is any hydraulic oil leaks on it that need to be fixed, etc.

Here is the back of the machine finished, I put 2 x 1/2 thick plates 12 inches long with a 1/2 inch hole drilled in one end and mounted them on either side I mounted these with 1/2 high tensile bolts then also run some weld along them for added strength, then I have built what is called a cradle, some of the people here did not know what it was or for when I was building it just shows you the experience that is in this town and why they built things wrong, very simple devise so long as you build it strong enough to carry the weight, I built this to hold about 5 tons dead weight, now as I did not build the machine, thankfully it would have cost me small fortune, and I have mounted this cradle along the centerline of the machine I just hope that it will hang straight when I try it out for the first time.

I also built a bracket for a seat on here and I had to modify it when I finally got the machine underground, so I could remove and replace it very quick and easy in about 3 seconds, but little did I know then that I would not the time to use it once I have learned the machine, still it may come in handy one day.

Here I am having the 3rd shaft opened up to a tunnel machine shaft, this shaft will be 5 feet in diameter for the bigger machine's it would be 6 foot, but I do not need it that big for my machine, this is how he starts the big shaft he has set up on the 3rd shaft and now is starting to ream it out to a bigger size than I require for my machine, this is a guess as we do not know for sure at this stage what size I really need but this will be bigger than I need for sure, then I can take a measurement later on and have the next one drilled to suit the machine, as bigger costs more.

We are on out way, he has just hit a hard band, you can just see it coming in on the right hand side, this hard band lasted for 18 feet and took almost 5 hours to get through, cost me a fortune in the end, normally to drill and ream out a shaft would cost around $1,000.00 at the time this was done, to just ream out the shaft cost $700.00 and this and drill one more shaft cost me $1,500.00 about $500.00 more than it should because of this hard ground, still cannot be helped have to have it done here as the ballroom is under there and would still cost if I had to move the shaft.

What happens here is that he reams the dirt for a while then pulls the bucket back up and then his offsider removes the reamers and the driller sends the bucket back down and starts to fill it by drilling into to it with pressure so it compress and stays in the bucket, then brings it up and empties it and he does this until all that he can get hold of is gone, remember that I have this small ballroom underneath and some of the dirt, quite a lot in fact is spilling to the side of the shaft and building up like an ants nest, then he starts to ream the shaft again and this goes on until he has reached the floor of the ballroom below and then he will try and go another 3 buckets further down, a bucket takes out about 18 inches of dirt in depth.


Where things are always on the Hop		And the wheels are always in Motion