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These opal miners are working on the
Olympic field, pulling dirt from underground with the blower and
then noodling the dirt with their noodling machine |
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Here is a another view of a noodling
machine: the loader puts the dirt in the hopper at the front and the dirt
then moves through the rotary sieve which removes all the dust and small
stones. The remainder of the dirt drops onto a conveyor belt to be sorted
out under a UV light. This ultra violet light makes the opal
fluorescent.
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This is a noodler and loader. The yellow
trailer is the generator plant - it looks like a second hand lion cage from the
travelling circus!. |
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Great care has to be taken on the opal
field as there are holes everywhere as the following pictures show. |
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Even in the middle of the road. (everybody knows that when you are driving around on the opal fields you are
driving over millions of dollars-well they decided to see if that was the
case ) |
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A miner could pop up from anywhere. |
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This is our blower we are using it to
open up a blind shaft. When we make a connection to the other shaft 15ft away
we will put in our elevator set which is a lot cheaper to run. |
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Front view of tunnelling machine disks
spinning at great speed with tungsten teeth cutting the face while the whole
arm rotates around the centre bit, shaving sandstone from the face as it goes |
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Rear view of machine with dirt feeding
onto conveyor underneath |
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Conveyor line feeding into elevator
buckets and up the shaft to the surface. Notice the falling level in the
wall behind the elevator buckets, This is falling away from the slide where
it starts to flatten out - this is where the opal is
meant
to be. But wasn't !!!
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