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September 30, 2009
Opal Mining Update - No 97 Back on track for Getting Things ready for Mining Again. |
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Sorry about last months newsletter, but as I am not mining it is hard to get enough material to make a newsletter at times, the kitchen is now finished as you will see below and I had few more things to fix due to this kitchen, messed up a couple of rooms and I have to get them back in order and it is a slow job for me as my legs are playing up, my left knee is getting worse or so it seems and need a knee replacement but as to when that may happen I have no idea as I have not asked the doctor about it as yet and my right foot which I have a bone spur on the heel and have had for just over 3 years now.
So I was on a waiting list to just see a foot specialist down in Adelaide and was supposed to be a 18 month waiting list but turned out to be three years, funny how it turned out but as I was doing the grouting on the tiles below I got a phone call from this hospital asking if I wanted to be still keep on this list, I had already told Pat that after this kitchen was finished I was going to see the doctor here about getting an appointment with another one if possible and he gave me reference to see a specialist in Whyalla, which is 70 kilometers south west of Port Augusta, we go though it on the way to our holidays, anyway I came home and rang then up and got an appointment for the 30 of this month. So I am off down there on the 29th as my appointment is for 2pm, but I have to get some X-Rays taken of the foot again before I go and see him and that is for 11:30am and I cannot drive from here to there in time for that so I have to go down to Port Augusta the day before and stay overnight at the motel we stay at when we go there and travel the 70 kilometers in the morning so I will have plenty of time, then when I have finished I will stay again over night in Port Augusta and come back the ext day the 1st, long way to go and see a specialist but have no choice and hopefully I can get the foot operated on very soon after that and that I can recover and get that foot back to normal. Plus I have also had a week or so putting jewelry items on the web site, its not all about mining and house fixing, I have also got to run the web site in-between the doing nothing and all the other things and I do not seem to be able to do a lot of running around while I have this problem with the foot and the knee, taking photos is alright as then I just have to sit at the computer and edit them etc, easy job, but running or walking around is bad for me right now, do a bit and that's all, can do mining when I get back to it and most of that when I get set up is jut standing behind the machine, anyway on to the newsletter. Today is Thursday the 6th of August and I am finally getting round to doing the back tiling in the kitchen, I have to admit that this has dragged on a lot longer than I every thought it would, but things have happened in the last few days to stop me, yesterday it was mailing items overseas, but at least I managed to get this wall ready for the tiling, the paint is 4 layers thick here, so I have removed the over painting so the tile adhesive can stick to the wall panel, I have already got two tiles ready with the power point hole cut in them, have had them ready for more then 2 weeks now, the other two tiles that need this will have to be done when I get to putting them on the wall so I can measure where to cut the hole in them, so now to start.  |
On this side I had to disconnect the stove/oven again and pull it out, because I had to drill and screw on a piece of board to the wall so I had something flat for the tiles to rest on while the adhesive is going off, this will be removed after the job is finished, no need to take the paint off this wall because it is stuck on real good on this Gyprock not like the one next to it where the sink is that is of a different material for the waterproofing, I have got the two bench tops dead level with each other so it should be easy putting the tiles across, (I hope) I will start on the other wall first.
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First row completed, real easy so far and looking good and the tiles are dead level across the top, so I am happy that I did a good job with the leveling up.
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Row two done and looking good, now for the next wall.
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Got like a racehorse with its ass on fire, but with two broken legs, taking me a while to get to here, now I have to stop while I measure and cut the hole foe the power point outside, then I will be back in action.
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Job done, I have some trouble in getting the power point through the hole as that idiot did not leave me enough slack in the cable for this, was very tight and I had to struggle in pulling the cable so I had enough to get it through, make it worse with having the adhesive on the back and I had the same problem with the one at the other end of this bench, but as I had taken off the panel inside this room to get at it I could pull the cable with my hand from the back to get enough slack to get that power point through, still the job is done now, thankfully and what I am most pleased about is that the tiles came together perfectly in the corner, so that tells you that everything was perfectly level.
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And the small cabinet top next to the walk in pantry is also finished, now I will do the grouting tomorrow, it as taken me over 6 hours to do this job in total, but as this is my very first tiling job I am very pleased with what I have done, but I still have to do the grouting so will have to see how that works out.
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Grouting finished on this side anyway, I have finished all of the tile grouting but ran out of grout while I was finishing around the tops of the tiles, so I just have the row of ten tiles to do on the sink top and the job will be finished, have ordered more and it will be in the post on Monday and I will finish the job on Wednesday, cannot buy this sort of stuff up here, so has to come from Port Augusta down south.
 As I will be doing the tiling in the lounge room, when we get round to doing it next year, I am now confident that I can do a good job, don't know how I will go with the knees but will find that out when the time comes. |
Today Saturday the 15th, we had a big dust storm again, after this comes the rain, sometimes an sometimes it just spits a few drops and make a mess of things, even when we get the thunder storms that normally bring the rain here we seem to always have a dust storm of some kind first.
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Yep just a few drops again and as you can see makes a mess of things, now Pat has to give her vehicle a wash so she can see through it, mine is almost as bad but as hers is on the outside of the line she gets it the worst, this is typical of most of the dust storms we get here in Coober Pedy during the year.
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This a shot of my so called cutting room, as I have said I have not done much cutting for a few years now, but I use the room quite a bit for other things including the sorting of the opal, after it has been cleaned, then it has to be weighed and got ready for photos, then bagged up etc, but as I had moved the doorway I had to move some of the tables around to a different position, so the ones at the rear were against the left hand wall and the cabinet in the right hand corner used to be in the space that this door opens up into, so a rearranging of the room is required, also need to sort out some of the accumulated stuff that is not really needed anymore and get rid of it.
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This is the hole in the room that I have to patch up, has been here since we bought the place but as I used it for a cutting room it did not bother me, put a shelf up above it and used the bottom as a shelf as well, but now I have got most of the stuff moved around all I have to do was move a couple of tables out of the way and now to patch this up, the previous owners who did this room left some panels outside the house so do not have to buy any for the job, had already started the job when I though about taking a photo, just have to rip off a coupe of the panels and replace them.
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Job done, only took me a week, now to re-organize things, have to put a shelf back up first.
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Shelf finished, this was used in the other spare room that is a storage room but as we have now got the new kitchen we have spare cupboards that have now been put in there and things are a lot neater now in there especially now we have got rind of a lot of rubbish, I used to have just a piece of timber as a shelf here, this is a lot better both to look at and to use, now to slowly over the next days or weeks to put things back so it can be a usable room again, but as I am not mining as yet there is no rush.
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This is the tool that I had to buy so I could do the kick boards on the bottom of the kitchen cabinets (next photo below) its made of plastic and cost me $79.00 and was worth every penny, as the boards are 6 inches high I had no chance of using the normal mitre tool, and some of the angle were at 22.5 degrees, the rest were at 45 degrees, this jig allows me to use my power saw after I had set the angle on it, the board sits against the arm where the angles are and under the guides the power saw runs in-between and worked very well, did a pretty good job, another first time job for me, probably will never use it again but a lot cheaper than getting a so called tradesman out to do the job.
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So here we are with everything in working order, I am please with what we have done, some of the finishing should have been better but will have to live with that, but the kitchen itself is a vast improvement on what we had before, I am glad that I did a lot myself especially in the cabinets assembly, god knows what that other idiot would have done for me and it turns out that I should have done more really or at the very least kept a closer eye on what he was doing, but I took his and his brothers word that he knew what is was doing, that will never happen again and I paid him week by week and that will never happen again either, next time it will be at the end of the job where I can deduct if he or they stuff up, anyway I have a new kitchen and here I am making a Spaghetti Bolognese Sauce.
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Took a drive out around a couple of fields today as I was trying to find where my friend Peter had mover too and as I had never been to this field but knew where it was I still had to find where he was, so here I am driving out to a place called Larkin's Folly, which is right at the back of Olympic, so this is the start of the trip just off the main highway and to give most of you that have not seen what the opal fields look like a view of the moon like landscape.
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All of the small dumps that you see as I drive round are called prospect dumps, that is to say that someone has drilled a shaft to see if anything comes up from one of more of the levels below, the larger dumps of course are from mining below, some will be just what we call Blower Dumps and some are from Tunnel Machines, all look the same from a distance, can only tell the difference if you are in the know and close up, track so far is looking very good, but I am in the 4x4 not the truck today.
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Here are three blowers, I an going to show you some of the equipment on the fields as I drive round to show you how different they are all but do the same job, hardly two built exactly the same in this town.
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Another one, you will also see that not many are working, in fact this morning I only saw one machine working on the fields, sign of the times.
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Same three as above but from a different angle to show you the dumps.
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Wide open spaces and nothing in sight.
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This is not a blower but using elevators and also not working as there is nothing else with it, it is missing the generator to run it and is a very unusual set up, the only one I have seen like this, not sure I would like to own it.
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Another one set up with elevators, has got the rest of the equipment with it but not working and no sign of recent activity.
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Another blower, got a nice big hopper on it which I would like on mine and again not set up for mining, just sitting here on the field.
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Now I have come off the field itself and am now on the old Alice Springs road now called 8 mile, this was a very good opal filed and a lot of good opal came from here but again not many if any are working it, but there are some shacks out here that people (miners) live in, so though I would show you how some still do it hard and live out of town with no town supplied electricity or water, they have to brink the water here in 44 gallon drums and provide there own electricity.
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Another shack and as you can see its pretty desolate out here, no shade of any kind, must get real hot during the summer.
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Surprising just how many there are out here, hidden behind dumps and mounds for some shelter.
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Same as above but taken from another driveway, so he has one road in and one out, most are just one way in and out.
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And the last one on the way back, was a couple more but a bit far in for me and I did not want to drive into there properties just to take photos on them, off the main road they cannot complain if they see me, this one also has some equipment that is not working or it would not be here, but as I have been past here before and seen this old truck that has been used to make part of a noodling machine.
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And here it is close up, looks like an old army truck, the things that they used to do in the old days, this has not been used for many years now, I have driven up and down this road a few times in the first year I was here (92) and it was standing there then as I remember so it has been here for more than 17 years now, more like a Icon of the Past, pity they cannot get a museum going for old mining equipment, they would need very big building for all that is around this town. |
We have had few Dust Storms this last couple of weeks, one was that bad it went down to Adelaide and across to Eastern Australia, just about shut down al of Sydney as all of the airports were closed were closed for a few hours, then it turned and went up the cost and reached Cairns in far north Queensland and managed to get across to New Zealand, so now they have a part of Australia.
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I had to go down to Whyalla to see a foot specialist about my right foot and I went down on the 29th of this month and got back yesterday the 1st of Oct, the trip turned out to be a waste of time and money, I had to get X-Rays taken of the foot at 11:30 in the morning on the 30th, then I had the appointment at 2pm to see this guy, had a look at the X-Rays and then squeezed the foot here and there and then told me that he could not help me as if he did do the operation it would not make much if any difference to the foot that I would notice.
I have had this bone spur on the right heel for about 3 years now and the foot like the left knee is slowly getting worse, so was hoping that I could get it operated on but not to be, turns out that I have Arthritis, Tendentious and Bone Degradation on the heel bone so not looking good, but although I limp most of the time it is not stopping me from doing anything, at the moment anyway. But I now have to get the left knee looked at as I need a complete knee replacement and is a big operation, (for me anyway) so today I have made an appointment with the Doc here for next Tuesday as Monday here is public holiday (again) he will then write another letter to another specialist and I will have to come home and make a phone call and make a booking with that guy and some time in the near future I will again be going down south for another appointment and more X-Rays. Do not know what I will be up to this month but still have a couple of small jobs to do inside and I will do something outside for sure, but is it going to be enough for making a newsletter I do not know, but will try for sure, right now it was raining again yesterday as I was coming back, another dust storm that reached all the way down to Whyalla and probably further no doubt including Port Lincoln, that was late on Tuesday, it blew a gale all day long then came the dust in the afternoon and on Wednesday as I left Port Augusta I rand Pat and she told me that it was raining heavy back here in Coober Pedy, it had started raining in Port Augusta about 2:30 am and work me up in the motel, and it rained on and off all the way back. I left Port Augusta at 8:15am and got home at 1:00 pm so made good time and only stopped once on the way, was not home more than two and a half hours and the sky open up and it pored down, the yard got flooded again and now there is water lying everywhere in big puddles, two of my friends that I have talked to this morning that are mining said that thy will not go back on the files until Monday and that is if it does not rain anymore and I have to say that it has looked like it would rain at anytime today, but as of writing this nothing has eventuated so far. So I have done my best for you all this past month and will try again for this new month, a bit late with this trip down south, so will see what happens during this month. 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. To return back to the Archived Page for more Updates click, Here! 
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