Stu Gardiner, Mark Denning & Estelle Sandford
With the newly installed 110v cable to the dig face we transported the small generator to the surface depression and connected the cable before starting the generator.
Once at the dig face we connected the Bosch Hammer Drill and to our relief the drill worked meaning the very old cable was still in a working condition. We started out by drilling lot's of 10mm holes in the rocks that needed removing, once this was done we bored them out to 16mm to allow the insertion of the plugs and feathers.
Quick progress was made and lot's of rock and rubble was removed. With the increased drill power the dust being generated was considerably more than that of previous battery powered sessions so we had with us some luxury dust mask (thanks Mark).
During an over ambitious rock splitting moment the plugs and feathers became wedged, we had with us an SDS chisel bit so this was used in an attempt to break the surrounding rock, and to our surprise this worked extremely well and the remainder of the session was spent using the chisel bit to remove a huge amount of rock and stal making the foot sized hole now body sized.
All bags were filled and even the skip so the dig face is currently packed with spoil needing to be removed during the next session.
It is thought that another generator / drill session is needed before hopefully the digging will be mainly mud and small rocks meaning lot's of skip hauling and digging as usual.
Total time underground: 7 hours
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