BMA Gold’s Twin Hills gold mine in central Queensland only took delivery of its Boart Longyear StopeMate production drill in January but already speaks highly of its performance.
Twin Hills mine operations manager Peter Gilligan says he is very happy with the machine.
“It is a good all round rig and due to it’s flexibility it suits all drilling processes from cable bolting to stope drilling,” Gilligan says.
“The level of service [from Boart Longyear] through commissioning and after sales has been excellent,” he says.
This is the second StopeMate delivered in Australia where the rig has only been available for the past 12 months.
As an indication of the drill’s compact size, the BMA Gold rig was flown in from Boart Longyear’s manufacturing plant in Canada.
The other Australian drill works at Mincor Resources’ Kambalda nickel operations in Western Australia.
There, Mincor’s Brad Breman says the drill is a real bonus working at the small Wannaway mine.
“With our air leggers doing remnant mining in small drives, the compactness of the StopeMate means we can still install cable bolts do probe drilling and drill blast holes from the small drives,” Breman says.
“The small long hole drill has created opportunities to mine ore that air leggers could not get to. It’s an ideal rig to work side-by-side with air leggers,” he says.
Boart Longyear manager of mining and construction Des Leonard tells Australian Mining that there is nothing else like it on the market.
“The drill breaks down into five parts that can be disassembled in one shift and reassembled in another, which means it can access the smallest of spots,” Leonard says.
“Because the drill is fully pneumatic, it really comes into its own in narrow vein mining,” he says.
Boart Longyear has sold 48 units worldwide since the rig’s conception in 1997. However, for most of its life the machine found service only in the north Americas where Boart Longyear’s contracting group runs 28 units. The company has upgraded the machine since making it commercially available.
Typical drilling applications include: narrow vein parallel drilling, fan drilling, ring drilling, cable bolting, pillar recovery, service holes in small openings, captive sublevels and inverse drop rises.
One person operates the rig and, because the controls are a distance from the feed assembly, the driller can rattle the drill string loose at a safe distance and then turn off rotation to manually remove the drill rod.
The rod is then placed against the wall in order of removal. When all the rods are out of the hole the procedure is reversed for drilling.