Le Roi Tool Warehouse

The Le Roi Tool Warehouse demonstrates a variety of equipment used for mining throughout the years. Unlike other methods of searching for gold, such as placer mining, hard rock mining requires large amounts of equipment in order to effectively extract minerals. As such, the tools available to miners were very influential, shaping the work that was done, the injuries sustained, and the profit that could be made.

Tools Through Time

Pre-Drill Mining

Early hard rock mining required significant manpower. The basic method used was to bore holes 15 to 20 centimetres deep in the rock, fill them with dynamite, and blast a tunnel to reach ore veins. Men would work alone or in teams of two to hit a sharpened bit with a sledgehammer. Teams of two would use 8-pound (3.6 kg) sledgehammers and solo workers used 4-pound (1.8 kg) hammers. Being a loud environment, when duos wanted to communicate they would signal by placing their thumb over the top of the bit - one can conclude that quite a few injuries occurred due to this shortsighted method. A team of miners working a 10-hour day could typically manage to drill, fill, and blast about 10 holes.

Pneumatic Drills

Pneumatic drills, running on compressed air created by a large above-ground compressor and pumped into the mine, quickly became the standard for hard rock mine drills. Using these drills, a team of two miners could drill a 1.5 metre hole in a matter of minutes. As such, miners could move 5 to 10 tons of rock per shift.

Stoper drills, a type of pneumatic drill designed for drilling up into mineral veins, were especially common in the Rossland mines. The first of these drills was invented by C.H. Shaw in 1890. Early versions of the drill were nicknamed the ‘wiggle tails’ by miners, as there was no mechanism in place to turn the drill bit, and therefore in order to avoid the bit becoming lodged in place a worker had to wiggle a handle back and forth to turn it.

While very practical and allowing for a huge boost in mine productivity, pneumatic drills posed some new dangers to the miners. Early pneumatic drills became known as ‘widowmakers,’ as the drills produced a fine silica dust when drilling into rock, which when inhaled caused silicosis, the disease more commonly known as black lung. There is no cure for this disease, and many casualties occurred from the poor ventilation and long hours operating these drills. In 1897, J. George Leyner, a man from Colorado, patented a new stoper drill that forced water through the drill bit when operated. This solved the deadly side effect of the drill, as the silica dust would turned into mud before it could be inhaled.

Pneumatic stoper drills remain the standard for hard rock mining today, changing little from the original designs of the late 1890s.

Assaying

An often hidden yet very important job in the mining world is that of the assayer. Since hard rock mining is a very labour-intensive and difficult pursuit, prospectors and miners needed to know whether a mineral vein was worth pursuing before they spent the time and resources on mining it. As such, they would drill a small cylindrical sample, known as a core sample, and give this to the assayer. These samples were cut using a diamond drill, which has a very long hollow drill bit to cut out the samples. Since the sample needed to be quite long, the bit was designed with diamonds placed inside the metal, thus as the drilling wore down the soft steel of the bit, new diamonds would be uncovered to continue the drilling.

The sample(s) were brought to an assayer where they would then determine what minerals the sample contained and in what quantities, allowing a decision to be made on whether or not the area is worth mining.

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