About The Project
There is a movement within the hardrock underground mining industry to convert to continuous mining methods in order to improve outputs of their operations. Thinking like the Oil & Gas industry where a pipe can be stuck into the ground and the product continuously pumped from the earth the hardrock miners are looking for new methods and machines to achieve the same result. Today there exists continuous mining machines but they are limited to soft-rock. In association with Sandvik we develop a targeted drill like the directional drills of the oil patch. The “Narrow Reef Drill” developed targets only the ore vein and drills and flushes the ore out in a solution to be pumped and processed on surface.
The “Reef Drill” was a product designed and engineered by MEDATECH to tackle a specific problem in the gold mining industry. The gold, where this machine was to be used, was found in a “vein” or “reef” that is very narrow but also very concentrated. Previous methods of mining this gold consisted of blasting a very large amount of rock and soil, which would result in a lot of excess overburden that would need to be filtered through to retrieve the gold. The Reef Drill was designed to focus on drilling out the gold, and basically collect the “cuttings”.
In the design phase, the precision and accuracy of the drill positioning system was of paramount importance. The distance to be drilled was to be over 30 meters, with the gold vein being only 30cm or less wide. Drill mast angular tolerances were required to be in the fractions of a degree to remain in the gold vein through the entire drilling stroke. Precision ballscrews were used to position and feed the drill. The precision ballscrews allowed us to very accurately control the position of the drill mast, as well as maintain a compact package.
MEDATech Engineering designed and engineered the rail cart, mast positioning system, and the drilling mast. We also designed and engineered the hydraulic system used to drive the positioning and drilling motors.
