October 31, 2005 Opal Mining Update - No 54 Not a Good Month and still no Opal.

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Here we are in another month already and continuing in that new drive that I just started at the end of the last update and I have hit alanite again, cannot seem to get away from it, its not that it is hard to cut but its very abrasive and wears things out quicker than normal, including the teeth which I shall  take a photo of sometime this month to show you how much of them is left, these tungsten teeth normally last for several years on tunnel machines but mine on the middle cutter have nearly gone, just shows you how hard this ground I am in is, very different from the level below which is damp.

That line or level that I am chasing has made into a ironstone level here and right now is looking good although there is no sign of any material or potch so far, but we live in hope and will continue.

You can see the gypsum line on the left side of the wall that is supposed to be the level, still not feeling good about this ground, like to see some potch or anything to let me know that the ground is active and that there is or could be a chance but so far this level is very disappointing, could be that there is nothing in this area, not on this level anyway and we know that the opal is not everywhere, so will continue for a few more feet to see if anything changes.

Here the level or whatever it is has shot up to the roof, I have altered the machine to go up but the machine cannot change the angle that quickly and the dark marks you see on the roof is what happens when I go up like this it is caused by the deflective rubber on the head just behind the edge of the outside cutter that is catching on the roof, this last for about 6 inches or so then as the machine settles into the new angle it just cuts a roof in the drive, but on a angle.

I have developed another hole in the bottom elbow and as you can see has made a pile of very fine dirt until it reached the hole, like a powder it is, will now have to get it fixed properly, could put another rubber patch on it, but its only a temp situation and does not stop the hole from getting bigger.

Here I am in about 43 feet and I have had enough of this drive so it is finished and I will be pulling the machine back tomorrow and start another drive just to the left of this one where I found that bit of material, have to go in and have a look but if there is nothing I will not tunnel to far, just about ready to quit this level here.

The dump is ready for me to move some of it, could put more up if I had to, but as you can see it is right up to the back wheels and if I put more up and make it higher it will flow onto the back of the truck and seeing that I have my own front end loader there is no need for that as I can move some of it when ever I like, not like the old days when I did not have it, used to put up as much as possible, then had to move the blower or go and find a big loader that would come and move the dump for me at a cost. I have already moved some of this dump twice already, just thought I would show you how it looks when it is up to the back of the truck, if I had no loader I can move the blower around a bit and put another dump up next to this one, this can be done about 4 or 5 times, then I would have to move to another shaft, or get a loader to move them, or part of them.

I did not bring the machine back as I called into Ross's on the way home to see if I could bring in the elbow for repairs and he told me that he was going away to Adelaide for a week on Wednesday and as this was Monday, so I went to work on Tuesday and went underground and took the elbow off and brought it in to repair it, here it is with the 2 patches on it. I also have another 2 holes come in the fan housing, one either side of a patch I put on when the blower was in for repairs just last month, mind you there was deep grove worn in the metal inside but could not weld it upside down as I am not good enough nor is Ross as we both tried so I put a long thick piece of steel on, but it has worn through on the thin part again either side of the patch, so will have to fix again, in the near future, sigh.........

On the inside of the elbow I have had a wear strip put in, like on the new elbow I had made for the top, but forgot to show you, the trouble with these elbows is that they are made is section and the inside is not completely smooth so the dirt tends to hit where the section is welded together, eventually wearing a hole in the metal and as you can see from the photo above always starts in the middle or there about's, so by me putting this 3 inch wide wear strip in the dirt will hit this and slide around it as it always hits in the middle of the elbow. Eventually when it starts to wear through I can just grind out the weld and take the strip out and put another one in, a lot cheaper than getting a new one made, as once to start to patch them they wear very quickly as the patch is on the outside and the hole is still in the inside and the dirt hit this hole and makes it bigger and bigger until you have to patch it again, after it has been patch a few times it gets very heavy with the extra metal and then it gets past being patched anymore and a new one will have to be made.

Here I am moving some of the dump, had to grease the loader up first, must look after the old girl, like the wife cannot do without her, I will move around half and then leave the rest, when I am tunneling with no problems I have to do this about every 2 days or so once the dump is this high, handy machine that front end loader, I used to pay for years to get my dumps moved, best buy I ever made was this machine, you have to be able to move dirt in this game, underground and on top if you want to find opal.

Here we are back in action, as you can see I have brought the machine back and started another drive next to the one I have just come out of, I wanted to keep the little bit of level on the left so I could see if anything came into it, there was bits of skin shell and some small pieces of seam potch, not worth taking photos of I'm afraid, this level will climb up as I tunnel in further, just like before.

The level has started to climb again as predicted and just about had enough of this level, it is producing nothing of any interest to keep me going and the ground is so hard and abrasive and is causing a lot of damage with the wear factor, so it is a waste of money and time if not even producing potch, I will do this drive until the potch disappears and then go 10 foot further and quit that level and come back down to the bottom level.

Here you can see how if is climbing up and for me this is the end of the drive, was going to go another couple of feet but the outside cutter has jammed again so it time to take the cover plate off and tension up the chain, this I will do when I get the machine back down the bottom and hope that I have not got any damage again to that sprocket.

I have just replaced the diesel drum on the mining truck and then filled it up, this one takes a bit more than the old one, I can put 210 liters in, which is fine until you go to pay for it and then realize that you have to pay more, this lot cost me $285.00, the price of Diesel here right now is $1.358, so you can see the expense is getting high, still cheaper than it used to be for me, but it has caused a some of the miners to stop working and some to quit this town, just in the last month I know of 2 that have put there equipment up for sale. Makes it hard form miners that are single and have no wife to back them up like me or have a wife and kids and the wife cannot work to bring in the extra money, this is a tough game if you have to reply finding opal all the time to carry on, as you can see by my Opal Mining Updates I do not find opal all of the time, not even a bit of the time and its not what you find but how much, need a good hit now and again to build up the bank roll for future mining, still we live in hope and have dreams that keep us going and when we hear of someone having a good strike, I think it could be my turn next............. Will take me a full morning work to bring the machine back down along with all of the pipes etc, which I will spread over 2 days, cannot rush that job as I have to walk up and down that 20% incline quite a few times and that will make my ankles hurt some I should think and it will take about an hour just to bring the machine back down the drive, she only travels 10 feet every 3 minutes, she is not a fast traveler for sure, but that does not matter when you are tunneling forward only when I am bringing her back, so I can live with that. Then when I am down, the next job and not that day will be to find out what caused the terminal to burn off on the battery on the Blower Truck and fixed it then I can think about moving the pipes and blower back onto the old shaft that I was on, would be a lot easier if I had a another pair of hands to help me, might see if the old partner that I had for a few weeks wants to earn a few bucks and give me a hand for the morning when I am ready. Have now finished moving all of the equipment back down to the bottom level along with the machine, that problem I had when finishing the last drive with the outside cutter jammed up, could turn it backwards so not much of a problem there or so I am hoping anyway, so this morning when I got it back down the drive to the bottom I put it in position where the light was good and then took the cutting plate off and then the chain cover plate, the small bolt had come loose again letting the sprocket and chain travel forward again, this time there was no damage done to the sprockets as the right chain is on. My fault really as I was supposed to have taken out the slack in the chain by adjusting the chain tension sprocket a couple of drives ago and I didn't, still I will have to get some Locktite to put on the bolt and that should help to stop it vibrating loose, still will fix it all up and put it back together and it will be ready for action soon as I have sharpened the teeth, not that there is much left on the middle cutter, wont be long before I bring that plate in and make teeth holders for it and put new ones in. I have had a few days off due to the weather, it had tried to rain a few times and then after a 3 days it did finally rain, this below is the second day that it has rained, but it does not rain all day, most of the rain we get here are Thunder Storms, which this is one and we had one yesterday, as you can see it dumps a lot of rain in a short time and the ground cannot soak it up quick enough so the run off from the water cause a lot of damage here in Coober Pedy.

Now it is just about over for this one, down to a light sprinkle, but the yard is flooded, will soon start to soak in and some will run away as our yard is not level, bit I am now worried about my claim on the field and if it has done any damage to any of my shafts to let water down any of them, wont know until I can get out there which wont be for a couple of days and that is if we don't get any more rain.

This is my old diesel drum off the back of the truck as I have replaced it with a new one, I was starting to cut the top out of this to make an incinerator to burn old papers etc in it and at a guess I'd say I had about 4 liters of diesel in the bottom of it so I turned it over to keep the rain out of it, yesterday, but the force of the rain this afternoon has rolled it some 30 feet , it was originally along side the truck, you can see the water running across the yard in front of the drum towards the fence where it slowly works it way out underneath to the road next door which also slants downhill behind the truck.

We had another Thunder Storm that night around 10pm and I did not drop off the sleep until after 11 so I do not know when it stopped, but the yard was still pretty much flooded the next morning so will have to wait another day before I can go out to the opal field, I just hope that this is our lot, we do not need anymore rain or I don't anyway, its in the south, east and west that they need it for the dams and the farmers, not here for the opal miners. Went out to the field today, Friday 21/10 as it last rained on Tuesday, my friend Peter next door, some 400 meters away tried to get out yesterday and got bogged about 400 meters from his claim, had to ring up someone in Coober Pedy to come and pull him out, he also has a 4x4, me I was not going out until today anyway, I always give it 2 or 3 days after a rain like that before I will venture out to the field and even then have to be careful. As you can the water has caused some damage to my claim here as this part is on a slant leading into a small gully, I was very lucky this time as the water had cut a track around the shafts due to having a small mound of dirt around them, but I will have to make this bigger for future rains.

Now the water had picked up speed and force and we are near the gully here which is behind me where I taking the photo from, it has carved it out pretty good and again I was very lucky, where the arrows are some water but not much flowed over the top of the dirt I had a round the shafts here and went down the shaft, as I could not go down today to have a look (tell you later about that) I used a mirror with the suns rays to look down the shaft and saw a dry floor at the bottom so all is good as far as I can tell so far until I can get down for a better look.

This is a view from the right side of the dump, it shows you a shaft in the middle that I have not connected to as yet, you can see that it has a high border of dirt around it and over to the right is the small gully that runs to the left at the bottom and is right next to a bulldozer cut on the far left in the background, you can just see on the right the where the water has run down towards the gully.

This shot is taken from the same spot and shows the way I drive into the claim, on the right hand side it is still soft where the dark spot is so had to stay to the left coming in, I did not notice when I took these photos, but if you look at the bottom right hand side of the photo you will see rocks in a line, better in the next photo, must have been some force of water to cause this lot to move in line.

This peg here is the left hand corner of the claim which is Pats claim mine is next door behind me and the 2 are joined together or amalgamated as they call it, you can see where the old claim is and where I am now used to be part of it, but never got this far over to mine it in them days due to wet ground, just in front of the old claim arrow is that small gully that I am tipping dirt into when I move it from the dumps, I had this just about full from the old claim as I was mining under it, but when I pulled the pegs and left for about 3 years someone came in and noodled it for the opal I had lost, so now I can fill it up again, only this time there will be no opal in there at all.

Now you can some idea of the gully, the area that I am dumping dirt into to is just in front on the right and further to the right, but here the water has really cut a furrow here as it runs down into it, you can just see the open cut (dozer cut) in the background and at the bottom and up slopes of this gully there are old square shafts from the old miners of the 60's.

This is the area where I am dumping and filling it in, it is now like a swimming pool, although I have seen more water on the fields than this lot of thunder storms has dropped this time, this is the first time I have ever seen water lying in the bottom like this, must be just the direction the storm came from don't know.

For some reason during the storms the batteries went flat, the one on the loader was dead flat not even a tiny spark when I tried to short it out with a piece of wire across the terminals and the one's on the blower were just to flat to turn the engines over so had to take them all off and bring them home to charge up, now they are back on fully charged we are back in action. I got my friend Dave to come out with me and take the starter motor off the blower truck for me as I am not that flexible anymore and it was hard to get to where it was in the old truck, brought it in and had it checked out, turns out the starter motor itself is working OK and is not burned out as I though it may be when it shorted out and burned the terminal off that battery last month, but the Pinion Gear which is made of brass has the teeth nearly worn off it and so will need to be replaced. I went to the auto electrician the next morning to see if the part was readily availably and it was already repaired, the part had come up on the bus overnight, this is the quickest I have ever had anything fixed in this town, now I am waiting now for Dave to get back to me as when we can go back out and re-fit it, then I will have to start the blower to see if it works OK, after that I can pull the pipes and cables and move them all back over to the old shaft I was on and set them up again, then I can move the blower over and I will be ready to start again.

I did gat a bit of water down the claim through one shaft where the water run over the top of the dirt I had around the shafts protecting them, here you can see it was around the back of the machine, not much and will dry out in a few days, perhaps in time for when I start working again in a couple of days from now, it did not go to fat forward as you can see from the dark patch on the ground, but there is more behind me here that covers a bigger area.

This is the area just to the right of the 2 shafts, on has the ladders down and the one that let the water in was the shaft that has the pipes down it, when they are here which wont be long now, the water form here has run to the left of photo down an old drive that I started to take down but had to quit because the ground was getting very wet, well its wetter now I can tell you, lucky for me a lot more did not get in or I could have been in a little bit of trouble for a while with sticky feet.

This is the short drive that it run into and down the bottom, I was going to do another small drive next to this one on the right hand side as I did find a 1/2 ounce pocket of green orange about half way down this drive, probably will still try and do the drive and see how we go, if it starts to get to wet will stop, by the time I have done this I will be ready to pull the machine out for repairs to the control leavers.

This is one of out famous dust storms in fact we had 3 this night it had first of all started to rain some and then no sooner had it started it that it stopped and this dust storm came behind it, this was a bad one and I feel sorry for my wife as she has to clean up the mess this leaves behind where she works at the Motel and the she also has to clean up around here as well, so these do not do us any favors, just like the rain, we do not need it here, most of the time it causes trouble in this town for the miners.

Here is the telescope from underground, this is the one that connects to the large elbow at the bottom, it had 3 holes in it, one from a pick, when I was taking the dirt out after I had open the big shaft for the tunnel machine to go down the young offsider I had then did it and the other 2 had worn in through there being dents in the outside, you can see some of the small dents just above the special wind up jack that I use at Ross's to get help get them out. After I have wound it up as far as I can I then tap them with a hammer to finish the job, does a good job, then I will bronze the small holes up and then I will get Ross to put another handle on it, opposite to the one that is all ready on there, as I run small rope pulleys with off these handles with ropes running through them, one for the revs and the other for dumping the hopper as I tunnel forward, anyway just thought I would show you how we do some of our repairs, there is a lot that you'd never get to see if I didn't take a photo for you to look at.

The starter motor that I have just had repaired for the blower truck which is a 1942 Mercedes Benz, which was made the year I was born, so we are a pair of old veterans, anyway it works better now than it ever has while I had the blower which is 12 years, the starter turns over very quickly and the motor fires straight away, something it has never done either. I did not realize that that pinion gear shaft was dry and that must have been slowing it down when it tried to turn the engine over, if I had known about that I would have done something about it, but cannot know everything so just have to wait sometimes until things break down before you learn about them, the last time that had oil put in it was probably when it was made 63 years ago, so I wont have to worry about that problem again. Below is my new 9 foot telescope I had made to make it easier to connect the blower to the top elbow and I have to say it works like a charm, not my idea, there is a few who use this system, just a bit slow to adapt it, now I do not have to drive the blower up onto the elbow, just park the bower about 5 feet away and regulate the height of the elbow till they match up and I can get the rubber and clamp on,  I also have the new top 55 degree elbow on as well the one I have made with part of a truck tire on it.

I have today just ordered a 90 degree elbow for down below with the truck tire on it and hope to have it by the end of the week or early next week, so you should see it in action next month, as today is Monday and the end of the month for us, the beauty about these elbows is that they can be hit with a large hammer to knock off the built up dirt inside, instead of taking the elbow off and doing it by hand, this is quicker and easier. As you saw above the machine is at the bottom of the drive and I have today just finished setting up the machine up ready for starting driving tomorrow, I will be on the bottom 75 foot level which is the level that has the ironstone in it and the level that I have found opal in, the last being that Harlequin Shell as I was do that drive going up, so I am hoping that I will be on material or some opal real soon, which will make a change, all I seem to have done this and last month was to pay out for things, would be nice to see some money come back in for a change, if only the expense's money Hope you have enjoyed this issue and look forward to the next one, hopefully I will have some good photos to show you in the next issue, of opal with color of course, I am hoping that this will be a good year for us, but only time will tell, so stay with us over the next few months and find out what goes on in our part of the world. But normally it Patricia Until the next issue......... Stay Tuned for the next Issue, who knows what I will have to report. Until the next issue......... and wish me lots of LUCK. Cya Later, Stuart Bird. To return back to the Archived Page for more Updates click, Here!

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