Dropping the nutty opal and ironstone level -

After removing some surrounding clay underneath and sandstone above, here you can watch me drop (remove) the ironstone (and potentially opal containing) level.
As with man of my other videos, this is set in a tunnel about fifty feet beneath the surface of The Comet opal mine in Koroit.
The Wow part of the opal mining process often requires a few steps. Sometimes as your mining a piece will break off of the level exposing beautiful colorful opal right there in front of your eyes in the tunnel. Other times the pieces you remove from the level just look like brown rocks, which would be rather uninteresting to the inexperienced eye. Often the Wow part isn’t clearly revealed until the pieces of rough are sliced or cut and polished.
I should be clear that I was rather excited and pleased by the pieces I harvested in this video. It isn’t obvious from my tone of voice. Even after mining for twenty years, I still don’t have Xray vision. However, the pieces I removed before this video contained nuts that showed color and particularly the main piece in the center of this video showed color in a few spots and felt solid and dense. It also showed on the surface the telltale lumps of some solid nuts. Most likely these pieces contain a few nuts with color. And I was delighted to see that there was more, similar material remaining in the wall behind the pieces I removed in this video. That material will be harvested in a few days.
In this video I’m using a Hilti TE 700 AVR jackhammer, which I love. I also use and love a Hilti TE 800 AVR jackhammer.
In the next few days I’ll be doing some slicing and will show you what’s inside the pieces of rough.

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