Opal Mining Newsletter January-31, 2007 on Mining Underground for Opals in Coober Pedy

January 31, 2007

Opal Mining Update - No 68

Not a Good Month again, plus lots of Rain here

Here we are in a New Year, what will it bring, what will I find, wish I knew, but will not be able to answer those questions until it has passed, there are time when I truly wish like a lot of people that I had that Magic Crystal Ball, but as I don't I will have to continue going blind and hope that I can run into a few pockets of opal during the year, if this claim does not start producing some opal within the first 4 or five drives I may be finding a new claim in another spot, so long as it is producing even potch I will keep looking as that means if there is potch around there could be opal around as well.

As I am going up the ground is changing constantly, which is does normally anyway, but seems to be more when you are going up through it, there is very little Alinite now in the face and right now it seems to be getting a bit softer, bit soon to really tell, but the next few feet will tell me more for sure, in that Alinite I have come across some material, looked somewhat green when I first saw it, but turned out to be just potch nothing more.

And here it is up close, I had already dug out a little of this, about what you see here last week but forgot about telling you about it in the last newsletter, again no sooner I had dug under it and got this out it was gone, so no opal here, but it is a good sign as it means that the ground is still active for material and is not what we call Dead Ground, so there may be a chance of some opal on the next level for me.

Here you can just see the ironstone outline of 2 shells, I see quite a few of these all the time when tunneling, but the one on the left had a bit of color showing so I had to stop and have a pick so I took the photo.

Here it is showing a little bit of green, but when I dug under it and then got it out this was it again, nothing but just a speck, still have to stop and have a pick, never know when it will lead to something of value.

Finally got some footage done today as December had been a quiet month for me, only did 3 foot 4 inches in all, not a lot but all I could manage, as I had a late start after filling the blower with fuel, removing 2 air cleaners and blowing them clean and checking the fan for wear which is has and needs to be taken out for repairs and replaced with the new one and I had one small problem while working that stopped me for a while, the machine pulled two pipes apart and the rubber sleeve that I have on one end of a pipe acting as a vacuum seal came off.

I had to get the revs off the blower real quick, I thought the rubber sleeve had gone up the pipe as it was gone from sight and which is the normal thing and has happened before, but I have to stop the blower as quick as possible, but as I am up this 20% angle drive I can not get down as quickly as if I was in a flat drive, I have to walk or hobble backwards with this bad ankle to turn off the blower as this rubber sleeve can get caught in the fan and throw it out of balance and then it will or can if the revs are on full it blow it apart again.

So after stopping the blower I had to go up top to see if I could find the sleeve, I had just dropped the dirt from the hopper before this had happened so it should have been on top of the dump but it wasn't so I had to climb the dump from the back of the blower which it is not easy with this dirt now being dry & fine, then I had check the top of the dump moving the dirt around by hand, nothing, then I looked inside the hopper as there are jagged edges in there from repairs that have been done in the past and a bag got caught in there once, again nothing, so I had to go back to the truck and get a 14mm spanner and come back and open up the inspection door again on the fan housing and rotate the fan by hand checking in the middle of the blades, where it can get caught, nothing again.

So I started the blower up and put the revs on full seeing if it would suck it in from where every it was, but nothing again and as the fan was not vibrating, I decided to go back to work so started the generator and went back under, went to put the pipes back together with another rubber sleeve which is not a good job to do when the blower is running and it turns out the original sleeve was caught underneath the bottom of the pipe, that cost me a lot of time and trouble, so I did another 6 inches and came home as it was then around midday and getting hot up top.

Always something to make my day exciting, did have little pick at the face a couple of times, once potch on the right hand side and later bit of skin shell on the left side, so the ground is still not dead which is a good sign for me, but the level is still a bit above me yet, I have to be about 55 feet in this drive and the level should be a round the middle of the face, as the 62 level is at 62 feet this time in the shaft so at 2 feet up for every 10 foot in drive length that means 55 feet I am there or round about.

So have about another 19/20 feet to go yet, that means this trace if you can call it that, is 4 feet below the level, sometimes we do have a shell level about 3 foot or so below a level, so as I said seeing the material is a good sign

Here I have come across Gypsum up the top and Alinite that has gone and been replaced by Soapstone and they very hard, I have had to cut down the rotation of the cutting head two 2 revolutions a minute, very slow, it was worse than you see here but the first photo had too much light in it and showed nothing, the Soapstone is slowly disappearing right now which is good but that Alinite at the top is a problem, the cutting head vibrate very bad when the teeth hit it and if rotating to fast can get jammed on the Alinite, so this is why I have to slow the cutting speed down, so the teeth can do there job, but slow me up real bad, so this is why I am not making any good footage just now, just have to live with it until I can get to the level and level the machine off.

The ground has gone very, very hard so hard I am having trouble even knocking nails in the side wall to hang the control ropes on, the cutting teeth need re-sharpening as well as I stopped the machine and brought it back from the face about 6 inches to have a look this hard ground is taking its toll on all of the equipment, but they will have to wait until I can at least get the machine level off, maybe until I reach the shaft, so I can create some working space, seems that the ground is getting harder the closer I get to this 62 foot level, right now I am just inching my way forward slowly, only gaining about a foot an hour which is very slow, but nothing I can do about it, but just keep plugging away.

Here I am 50 feet up into the drive, thought I would have seen the level today but nothing that I can see as yet, at 55 feet I am supposed to have the level about 2 foot down from the roof so in the next 5 feet I will go up one foot, as this level is not like the one I have just finished on, there is no Iron Stone Level here, the only thing I saw in the shaft I am heading to is a ring of Gypsum, so I am hoping that I can see a change in the ground, that is 2 different colored sandstones in the face and in the middle is the level, so the next day will tell me I hope.

Tomorrow I am bringing a friend out to give me a hand to change over the fan over, it has a lot of wear in it and needs to replaced with the new one and brought in be repaired and then re-balanced and as I now have this spare fan we will change it over and I will repair it after I get back from holidays.

Here are couple of photos of the fan and it is bad, caught it in time would not like it to go past this point as it is already badly out of balance and would only get worse, you can see how this hard ground chews out the metal, the worst is the Alinite, it is very, very abrasive, then we have what is called Concrete, then Gypsum and Soapstone and last the hard Sandstone, this ground also cause's the teeth to wear down quick and wears holes in the elbows, now you can understand why the machine is struggling to cut going uphill, bad enough if it was on level ground, which it will be in another week from now.

Now I will take it into Ross's when I get back from holidays and fix it, I will buy a packet of hard facing welding rods when I am in Perth on holidays, be cheaper then here, the last time I did this job I used 54 rods on the blades and that was on a new fan so this will take a few more, then when I have repaired this one I will take it back out to the field and change it over straight away and then bring the new one in and do that as well, then they should last me a little while.

I had this patch of different ground come in and I was starting to think if this could be the new level for me, if so it was a bit lower than I thought it would be, but it really does not look like it and so will keep going if I go to high I can always come back and level off, but if I level off too soon it will cause me a lot of problems and time and money as I would have to blast some of the side walls in the make more dirt so I could start the machine going up again, so I will continue until I am sure or as sure as I can be.

That patch of ground above has disappeared now and left a thin line of Gypsum and a little Alinite and a little bit of potch came in on the far right hand side, but it is to low to be the 62 foot level for sure, got to keep going up.

Here you can see how I keep trying to keep the machine cutting at the 20% angle, which is hard to do I this hard ground, when the angle gets to 30% I back the machine up on these 2 pieces of timber about 3 feet with the floor cutters down, as the machine dips down at the front by climbing up on these timbers the floor cutters cut out the floor and brings it back to around the 20% again, this I do about every 6 to 9 inches, slows me down and takes up most of the time, but I am getting there slowly.

There is some gypsum coming in from the roof, this could be the level as I am now out almost 55 feet as I said I thought it would have been in the face already, but now I have to re-align the machine again back to the 20% or as near as anyway.

And here it is slowly coming down, I will have to do another foot or so to see if this is it or not, but as I am now 55 feet into this drive and this is the distance that I worked out for the level to be in front of me about 18 inches down from the roof and for me to be 11 feet up from the level below, but the level is still too high if this is it, so we will see what happens in the next couple of feet that I do.

This is a photo of the dump as you can see, just shows you how powdery the dirt is, I am not really cutting in the face below but rather scratching it, so all of the dump now is like powder, when it drips down it runs like snow and when the wind is up, it blows the dust from the dump real bad, I was to go to work now and the wind was blowing so that the dust would blow onto the engines on the blower I would come home as it would not be good to run the engines with this powder blowing into the air cleaners.

I have never had a dump like this before, shows you how hard the ground is, hope it changes again when I have leveled off the machine and get past the next fault in front of me and the one to left hand side also, time will tell.

Here is the top elbow, you can see that is has worn through in 3 places, the middle wear strip I put in did a good job, but what has happen here is that it has worn to one side and this is through the black plastic pipes down the shaft being bent, when I put them down I alternated them, putting one bend to the right side and the next pipe with the bend to the left side, this was to try and get them as upright as possible so the elbows will sit against the flanges square and this works out great.

But I did not recon on the dirt being thrown to one side and off center in the top elbow, learn something everyday, as I have been in wet and damp ground for so long it has not been a problem, but now I am in dry and very hard ground it is, if I had set the pipes up with the bend facing towards and facing away from the elbow with the last bend facing the elbow this may not have happened, but it has also worn that side of the wear strip as well, so will now have to fix it.

This is what it looks like on the outside and what I see, I have worked with this a few days longer as Ross was away for 2 weeks and this came in so I had no option but to work with it as I do not have my own little workshop at home, I have always gone down to Ross's and used his every since I started here mining and of course I do need a hand at times to do these repairs and his expertise comes in very handy.

Here it is finished, not the best looking repair we have done, but it was not an easy job and took a lot longer than I thought it would, bending and getting these 4 inch steel strips to sit in there properly, there was a gap in the middle which had to be filled in and I had to cut some small pieces of steel to fit in there and then Ross ran the Mig Welder over the top of them, after this has had some of this hard dirt go through, it will get cleaned up nicely and when I come back from holidays I will take if off again and bring it in and I will run some hard facing rods over this whole area while the steel is still thick enough to take it, this will then allow me to repair it by welding with hard facing rods in the future as it starts to get wear in there, I just hope that the strips are wide enough, would have been a lot easier to just put the small patches on the outside which I have had to do anyway to block up the holes so it does not suck air in and create a loss of vacuum and leave it at that, but the trouble is that it would be soon full of holes again and the holes on the inside are still there and the dirt catches on these and starts to wear it away real quick, so it would have been off in a couple of weeks, this way it will last a lot longer.

Thursday Jan-21-07 and just my luck again, lost 2 days with Ross not being there in the mornings to open the workshop as he had personal business to take care off and now I have got it finished and ready to go back to work it has rained, this is the second day now, they have been forecasting it for some time now but it had never eventuated, but now here it is with interest.

Our annual rain fall is about 4 inches per year, but if we get it all in one hit this is what happens in this town, we get flooded and quick, I know this is nothing compared to what a lot of the readers of this newsletter get where they live and in the cities and major towns this would just run away and be back to normal the next day, but here it causes a lot of damage around the town.

As you can see our yard is not level and this year when we come back off holidays we are going to have the veranda extended out by 5 meters (about 17 feet) that is if the council approve the plans that I have only just put in yesterday, this will not stop the ground where the vehicles getting flooded but will keep the vehicles out of the weather, especially the sun.

The whole yard is now flooded, this is some serious rain we are having right now, it started off as just normal rain yesterday morning about 4am and rain until 11:45am then stopped for the day, then today Thursday it started again on and off during the morning and then the rain then got heavier in the afternoon with Thunder so now it had gone into a Thunder Storm, the worst for us as the water comes down real quick and cannot soak into the ground real quick, as the ground is already soaked from yesterday, we had the yard flooded yesterday as well, but not quite as bad as this an that has soaked away by night fall, but now the ground will not take anymore and this will take some time to run away and soak back into the ground.

Pat my wife wants me to get more gravel from the council and spread it around the yard to try and level it up some, but I will not be able to do that until I have done the extension to the Veranda as I have to get a post hole digger in the drill 7 holes for the posts, so after that is done I will try and get that done for her.

After the rain had stopped for awhile I went out and took these photos of the side street, you can se the water running down in like a small river, this water will cause damage on this road for sure, the red/white antenna's in the background is were the local Police Station is and the white building to the right of them belongs to the Court House, this is a very quiet neighborhood to live in here and so far we have had no trouble with break-ins while we have been away on holidays.

As I said like a river, the water from out yard is starting to run under the fence in a couple of spots so will add to this river.

On the corner where the water is going round it will be digging a furrow for sure, does it every time, not many live round that corner only a couple of semi dugouts, but still it will be a small problem for driving up and down till it gets fixed, just hope the rain has gone for good now.

I have just been out today Sunday and had a look at that corner and here it is, gouged out, they can drive around it on the other side of the road it is only bad right on the corner, the council will come and fix it with a Grader in a few days time, they will have a lot to repair again after this rain as this type of damage will be everywhere in Coober Pedy, even some Dugouts will have got flooded to some degree including my mate Dave the mechanic.

Now I have to hope that I did not get any water down any of my shafts on the field, I will have a furrow like this though for sure on the side of the hill near one shaft but I have not connected to that shaft as yet.

I have been out on the field at last, I had to wait until Wednesday 24th to make sure that the track was dry enough for me, but as usual some idiots had already been out there and cut it up real bad, and this is the track of the main track out to my and my friend Peters claim and as I am the only one who is working out there at the moment, it must be pillar bashers why they keep insisting on going out on this field when we have had a big rain I have no idea as it like this every time it rains and they get bogged or very nearly anyway looking at the way the wheels have gone down in the mud, and all they do is cause damage to the track that stays like that until some idiot like me fix's it with the loader, this time I am not going to waste my time fixing it again as I do not intend to be around here much longer, unless I get on to some opal real soon when I get back from holidays.

I have some repair work to do around my claim when I get back, today was to just see if I had got any water down the shafts and put the repaired elbow back in place and chain it on so it cannot be stolen and bring in the batteries from the blower and loader, which I must say I forgot to do, only had 4 things to do and forgot one of them, must be getting old, here you can see how the water has followed its normal track down the hill and thankfully gone around the dirt that I have protecting the 3 shafts here, I will have to fill these in with the loader when I get back, waste of time today as it may rain again while I am on holidays so better to leave it as it is.

See how it has gouged out a deep furrow, hard to tell how much water has been here but there are still small lakes around on the fields that can be seen when driving along the main road, that what really pisses me off with these Idiots that go out straight after a big rain, they know the ground is very wet and boggy and as everybody works for themselves they do not have to go on the field for a few days but no, they have to have there gambling money for the horses, smoking drinking, but the miner, the proper miner who has some brains takes this time off to do something around the house or just to relax, while the ground dries out, even today this track was soft under the wheels, but was not that soft that the tires dug in and this is almost a week later.

That peg you see in the background is one of my corner pegs and just behind that dump about 10 feet from the peg is a shaft, this is the shaft that the blower was on before I let that claim and was working towards this spot where these 3 shafts are now, but could not get here because of the wet ground I was working in at the time, could not pull the dirt more than 80 feet so I had to quit.

This is a shot as I drive onto my claim, I actually drive in from the right hand side of photo so all of this has to be fixed as well when I get back off holidays, the shaft you see here is a blind shaft, it means that I have not connected to it as yet and may not as I drilled it in the wrong place, this was drilled at the same time I open up the big shaft for the tunnel machine and as I had no experience then I thought that I could get the machine to the next level within 50 feet, I now know that this is not possible, I need 90 feet at least for this, so this shaft was waste of money, but all part of learning as it turns out, if I find opal from the shaft I am tunneling to right now, I may double back and head to this shaft to prospect to the right of photo, the dumps just across from where this water has caused a furrow is my old claim and the dumps are mine, this is what I refer to as My Old Claim.

Now you can see the water has picked up speed here, looks like a river bed, considering that I am dumping dirt here from the blower and all of this was flat, there was a small gully here and still is to the left and this runs down the hill towards that Dozer Cut you se in the background, but the water would not reach that as there is a lot of ground between me and that cut and the water lies in there, like a small lake with this amount of rain, although it has soaked in by the time I get out here to have a look but can see where it has been by the dried mud and water marks that it leaves behind.

And last of all, the gulley it self, this must be at least 3 foot deep, so it has moved a lot of dirt as this goes all the way to the right of that dump and that was also filled in so it has cut a big track down the hill, just glad it did not find its way down one of my shafts or I may have had sticky feet for a while, would not have got too flooded as I have plenty of drives down there now to spread the water around.

Well that is it for another month, not the start I wanted for the new, was hoping that I would have been up to the 62 foot level and opened up around the shaft or that was the plan anyway before I went on holidays but did not happen, pays not to make plans in advance, hope this ground pays off in the long run, wet ground now hard ground, cannot seem to take a trick just lately but will soldier on for a while longer before I decide to pack my bags and move, trouble is finding another spot that can or will produce opal.

There are thousands of places that a miner can try and may find a bit of opal, but now I have a tunnel machine it is not that easy or cheap to move, I cannot go back to hand mining due to the regulations the government have brought in now due to the overkill about Terrorist's coming up here and pinching some (What a load of Shit, just Big Brother taking over again) making it next to imposable to comply with there rules for keeping and storing explosives safely on our property as I do not have enough room here.

So now I have to be very selective when I move and open up again as I would have to be there for at least a year or more, which at the speed I am tunneling right now would not be hard to do, but should I find some good ground for a change that tunneling rate would change drastically, I really need to get 25 to 30 feet a day done in my morning shift if I am not finding or stopping to pick at anything, still we will have to see what I find in the area that I am about to look around, there is still a good chance for me as it is still opal bearing ground.

So now we are off on a much needed Holiday, for Patricia sake more that anything else as she has worked hard this last year and as she is getting older (65) working at being a Housemaid is not getting any easer at her age and I must admit I always look forward to going fishing, we are headed for Perth - West Australia this year, where we came form before settling down in Coober Pedy, we are going to see our son and wife and our grandchildren who we have not seen for a few years now and is overdue.

We will be in Perth for one week and then north some 600 kilometers for 7 weeks at a place called Kalbarri http://www.kalbarri.com/ we used to fish all up and down the west coast before we came here and this used to be a nice place for fish and from what I read they are still catching a few big ones and we are going to be there at the right time of the year for fishing so hope to catch a few big ones and be able to show you all again what we get up to again this year on the water.

Again I Hope you have enjoyed this issue and look forward to the next one, hopefully I will have some more good photos to show you in the next issue and maybe some of Good Looking Opal and lots of it, I am still 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 as far as Opal Mining goes.

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.

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