mine shafts depth

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Hi everyone. mighgt be a silly question but i thought ill ask to fully understand.

when people talk about they got x amount of gold for a depth of say 400 feet. im assuming there talking about the sunk a shaft to 400 feet then tunneled off from there???

or they saying they got all that gold at the 400 foot mark for jus the shaft??

thanks
Ben
 
Yes must have known potential was good to persist.
With old multi level reef mines there is often a tunnel at the every 100 feet mark depth, when a reef was struck stoping occurred and the quartz was taken out at the most suitable level for processing, the better mines had the own batteries onsite.

Would be great to go back via time travel to see what occurred. :Y:
 
Swinging & digging said:
Yes must have known potential was good to persist.
With old multi level reef mines there is often a tunnel at the every 100 feet mark depth, when a reef was struck stoping occurred and the quartz was taken out at the most suitable level for processing, the better mines had the own batteries onsite.

Would be great to go back via time travel to see what occurred. :Y:

where there's a stope they did this for one main reason it was to take out the richest part of the lode/reef

some mining districts shared battery's often one big company had the cash to cart the battery and make tracks to the mine to make it on site other smaller mines would use it for a fee. can you imagine back then if 60 mines in the high country all had batteries with huge steep hills you had to make tracks across before even getting a battery in there not to mention the creeks trees in the way etc. ? it would be a waste of money and time and effort to make so many for one area when all the mines can use 1 or 2 that have been setup already. and not to mention the cost of running 60 batteries plus wear and tear. often not the best mine had its own battery this was mainly because of its remoteness or other costs such as pumping water railways and tracks to the actual mine so they could cart supplies to the mine and rock out.
 
ben2363 said:
yeah not wrong there ?. jut reading a few old books and its amazing how far they went down.. then to tunnel from that depth is amazing

in Bendigo they almost got down 3km in the early 1920s. and to think all that rock was moved by hand is amazing although they did have explosives and they did make ore bins and chutes to direct the ore down to a deeper level using gravity to their advantage then they could truck it out in carts to the main shaft.
 
If they were tunnelling in following alluvial into the hill where an ancient creek or river had been well and truly buried over time they would mine along under the old bottom and drop the good stuff to take out recover the gold ,.... in that case they would be recovering gold all the way as they followed it into the hill.
 
Even back then a lot of those deep shafts were done by companies or lots of men. It's just too much for one man to do on his own. They must have known what they were doing though. Ben I think what they did was tunneled off, they called it putting in a "drive". So the gold didn't just come from the main shaft.
 
Looking at the number of shafts in close proximity to each other in the Mogo area leads me to think that many of the shafts were dug on a hunch and that most of them were 'dry'. In saying that it would also be the case that many miners went bust in trying to find their own 'Eureka' moment.
 
Hunting the yellow said:
ben2363 said:
yeah not wrong there ?. jut reading a few old books and its amazing how far they went down.. then to tunnel from that depth is amazing

in Bendigo they almost got down 3km in the early 1920s. and to think all that rock was moved by hand is amazing although they did have explosives and they did make ore bins and chutes to direct the ore down to a deeper level using gravity to their advantage then they could truck it out in carts to the main shaft.

There's some great recent pics of the Bendigo underground workings here:
http://monissa.com/432pages/central-deborah-mine-bendigo/
 

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