Blasting finally starts

Late fall 2008 . Around the same time as I was working the large mass of quartz and finding the pockets the old air track drill showed up. This machine is an antique but the price was right and for the amount of drilling I would be doing it would work fine. The drill hadn't been used in over 10 years so it was in need of some tlc. A few hoses needed to be replaced and I took the hammer apart and cleaned it up. I did some general service work on the compressor and then it was up and running. Many of the miners in Maine are drilling with a hand drill and compressor. This is hard work and some what slow, where I was a one man show and had a fair amount of rock to move using the air track seemed like the correct route to go. I found out that as long as you had good going and a relatively level area to work the air track worked well but there are times due to some steep slopes or access is that it is much more challenging. I need to make a road every where that it needs to go and there is constant moving of the air hose(bull hose). They don't call it the bull hose for nothing as it needs to get bulled around and it is not very light or manageable.

drilling to help create better access

The frustrating part of doing the first several blast is that it would not benefit me in any way of finding any new mineralized areas. I was doing the blasting to get better access into the mine. This had been a concern from day one and I had devised a plan to start to lower the south east wall to make it easier to get man and machinery in. This was going to be a fair amount of work with no immediate gratification but it would make it much easier to work for the long haul. Also the mineralization was bumping up against this area and some of this rock was going to need be removed in the near future if I wanted to continue and explore the mineralized area.

Remnants of a large blast that was done to create better access into the Havey. The waterhole is in the Berry quarry.

Removing the blast material seen from the Northwest side of the quarry and the access road to it.

I was having a difficult time trying to decide where to start blasting for the mineralized area and not do any damage to any of the potential pockets. I new where I wanted to get to and that would be the quartz pod with all of the tourmaline in the matrix. The areas surrounded it also looked somewhat promising with beryl, large blocky feldspar, schorl to name a few. When I was cleaning up from the blast for lowering the entryway I found a fracture in the ledge and was able to rip up a slab that was probably 15 ton. In doing this it was easy to see that underneath the area of schorl the rock turned to junk. This made it very easy to choose where to start to go down. I would be able to start blasting just se of the basalt dike. The basalt dike typically will stay in place if you blast on one side of it and give a clean wall. This also would keep me far enough away from the quartz pod area so that I would not damage it. Before winter set in drilling was done so that in the spring blasting could start in earnest and hopefully find the tourmaline pocket.

Putting the Havey to rest for the winter 2008