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Any core drillers I the house?

ThePanzerFuhrer

ThePanzerFuhrer

The Rock Breaker God
Joined
May 19, 2020
Member Number
84
Messages
2,498
Loc
Wi
I need to take some hard rock core samples in a few different properties. I want to see the depth and quality of the rock to make sure it is what I want. I’m thinking a 1 5/8 core with depths to 50-75 feet at the most. I want something I can use by myself so I do not get the neighborhood all stirred up.


I see there are some backpack core drills Shaw. Or winkie that would meet my needs. My questions are has anyone used one before? What are the order of operations for drilling a core? (Drill break extract repeat?) should I fab up a sled and mast for my skidsteer so I’m not hating life lifting a 50’ drill string?

I stopped by my local guys that do this stuff ad they gave me a fu price of 75-100 a foot in hard rock. They mainly do soil Boreing and stop at the hard stuff. Also if I show up with 2 tractor trailers of shit and a 30,000 pound rig the neighborhood would blow a gasket.

Figured I would ask here as there are quite a few big time miners here.
 
If the neighborhood will get that butthurt over you taking samples, won't they lose their minds if you start mining the area?
 
Don’t need to give them a head start. They are rural properties and you know how people are they’ll see something and not come and talk to me about it. Instead they’ll speculate and start a Facebook opposition to it before they have the facts. Not to much different than this place lol :flipoff2:

Mostly it’s because I want to prove out my current hard rock pit. Make sure the stone is where I think it is and not get soft on me.
 
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Derp said:
If the neighborhood will get that butthurt over you taking samples, won't they lose their minds if you start mining the area?
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They're welcome to get upset once land is acquired and permits are in place.
 
You are going to have a hard time drilling hard rock with no downforce (crowd). The depth of hole you describe will not offer enough weight of drill string to do much good. Not going to say you can't do it, but it will take forever and wear out more rock bits than is worth it. Tri-cones only work with sufficient downforce. Airtrack is more common to make hole, but you wont likely have a big enough compressor to rig that up. Home rigger will be mud rotary, again sufficient mud pump to accomplish. Coring will be diamond bits on a 2 or 3 body barrel. Diamond bits on barrels dont like cutting too slow or too fast, fuk em up either way.

To be plainly honest, it isnt going to be worth the money in equipment to do this. You can shadetree borings in soil if you are resourceful. Hard rock is a different story. Only doing a handful of holes, just hire a guy. Gonna do it as production exploration for a mine/quarry, buy a dedicated rig.
 
ThePanzerFuhrer said:
Don’t need to give them a head start. They are rural properties and you know how people are they’ll see something and not come and talk to me about it. Instead they’ll speculate and start a Facebook opposition to it before they have the facts. Not to much different than this place lol :flipoff2:

Mostly it’s because I want to prove out my current hard rock pit. Make sure the stone is where I think it is and not get soft on me.
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What's the difference and why do you care?

I know not all rocks are equal, but can you work with either or both? Is hard rock more valuable?
 
Pony_Driver said:
What's the difference and why do you care?

I know not all rocks are equal, but can you work with either or both? Is hard rock more valuable?
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my hard rock pit is a granite fledspar. There are sections of it that are decomposed. They have a hard top the turn soft. I cannot use the soft stuff to make concrete stone. Last year I had to drill and blast another 25,000 ton to get enough hard stone to make the high quality concrete stone. The soft stuff makes fine road gravel. It’s just I don’t need road gravel atm.

I have about 4-4.5 a ton into it. Having 100k in gravel sitting there waiting knowing it will take 2 years to sell sucks.
 
Pony_Driver said:
What's the difference and why do you care?

I know not all rocks are equal, but can you work with either or both? Is hard rock more valuable?
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Hard rock is more valuable to me as I like that kind of music and it's easier for me to work to. Soft rock is completely useless and should be left buried wherever you find it.
 
I've never seen a rock core under 1.5 or 2" for what you're doing. And they're always truck or track mounted rigs. You're not going 50"+ with a portable.

Look up geotechnical engineers in your area. They do it for the DOT and building architects/engineers all the time. But it won't be cheap.

What about the guys that drill for your shots?
 
If only you weren't half a country away. Geo guys around here will core with their small rigs if needed, part of the game. I think it was $ 2,500 for one day to do some probes last I needed to. I've run a 6" DTH on this machine, like to think it would turn a small core barrel.
20170925_103444 (2).jpg
 
clodhopper said:
You are going to have a hard time drilling hard rock with no downforce (crowd). The depth of hole you describe will not offer enough weight of drill string to do much good. Not going to say you can't do it, but it will take forever and wear out more rock bits than is worth it. Tri-cones only work with sufficient downforce. Airtrack is more common to make hole, but you wont likely have a big enough compressor to rig that up. Home rigger will be mud rotary, again sufficient mud pump to accomplish. Coring will be diamond bits on a 2 or 3 body barrel. Diamond bits on barrels dont like cutting too slow or too fast, fuk em up either way.

To be plainly honest, it isnt going to be worth the money in equipment to do this. You can shadetree borings in soil if you are resourceful. Hard rock is a different story. Only doing a handful of holes, just hire a guy. Gonna do it as production exploration for a mine/quarry, buy a dedicated rig.
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I don’t want hammer drilled holes. Hard to tell if the stone is hard or soft from the cuttings. I do have a air trac in the back yard. Just don’t have the 500hp compessor to run it. I could take the mast off put a hydraulic drill on it and hook it to my skid steer lol. Down pressure and mobility.

I’ll prolly find some company who does this for a living And get a price from them.
 
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Chzbrgr said:
If only you weren't half a country away. Geo guys around here will core with their small rigs if needed, part of the game. I think it was $ 2,500 for one day to do some probes last I needed to. I've run a 6" DTH on this machine, like to think it would turn a small core barrel.
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That would be a perfect setup.
 
SLOWPOKE693 said:
Rent the compressor for a few days/week to drill it yourself?
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the air track is a hammer drill. Not sure you can turn the hammer portion off. Not sure if it even loads works yet it was a ran when parked you can have it type deal. I was gonna park it out front and make a sign out of it.
 
ThePanzerFuhrer said:
I don’t want hammer drilled holes. Hard to tell if the stone is hard or soft from the cuttings. I do have a air trac in the back yard. Just don’t have the 500hp compessor to run it. I could tack the mast off put a hydraulic drill on it and hook it to my skid steer lol. Down pressure and mobility.

I’ll prolly find some company who does this for a living
And get a price from them.
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Well, I figured you wanted cores, typically mud-rotary or something, but you need a hole made down to the rock and if you are in the quarry biz, you would probably have access to, or know someone with, an airtrack. Which it turns out is you. You could rig the airtrack to mud drill, probably need a different swivel to handle the mud and a big enough pump. I usually see moyno style for coring, although I used piston pumps years ago to do it. I could see maybe just punching the hole in hard rock if that was all you needed, might even get a local well driller to do that. But the core.... that is what really hangs you up doing it yourself. The money to get a core barrel and associated gear.... not worth it for just a few holes, especially when you are spending on re-rigging the wrong machine to fake a hole anyway. And, coring isnt a task for someone just learning or DIYing it. Easy to screw up and mistakes are expensive.

Again, call a guy. There are Geotechs and contract drillers somewhere not far from you that have the gear and would be happy to do it.
 
ThePanzerFuhrer said:
the air track is a hammer drill. Not sure you can turn the hammer portion off. Not sure if it even loads works yet it was a ran when parked you can have it type deal. I was gonna park it out front and make a sign out of it.
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Those old air tracks don't have a lot of torque. Seem to need to hammer to do anything. Don't think a small core barrel would appreciate that.
 
clodhopper said:
Again, call a guy. There are Geotechs and contract drillers somewhere not far from you that have the gear and would be happy to do it.
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My sister set me a text a few weeks back, and it sounds like they are gonna do some more exploratory drilling at a vms deposit that not too far away. Maybe I’ll wait till they are around and see if they would punch a few quick holes. They are the guys who core for a living and go deep.

I just need to find a vms of my own lol. The last one they mined in the state they found 181,000 tons of copper 300,000 Oz of gold and 2,000,000 oz of silver. It came out to like 2-3 billion in stuff off a 35 acre hole.
 
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Have you approached any water well drillers? Not knowing anything about any of this I do know that many water wells around here are drilled into hard basalt rock.

Also, I'm not sure about WI but you can look up all well drilling records in Michigan dating back to the 40's. They usually have a pretty good description of what was found at different layers while they were drilling and you might be able to confirm or debunk your theory's about how the bedrock is laid out using those records.
 
ThePanzerFuhrer said:
My sister set me a text a few weeks back, and it sounds like they are gonna do some more exploratory drilling at a vms deposit that not too far away. Maybe I’ll wait till they are around and see if they would punch a few quick holes. They are the guys who core for a living and go deep.
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If you know the company, you will probably want to contact them ahead of time. More work in the area of an existing job usually enjoys better pricing. If you wait til they are there working, you might find they are scheduled to another job somewhere else and wont fit you in. Those rigs dont sit idle unless they are broke down.
 
Make up some type of buried treasure story and have the guys from Oak Island come in and drill/core a couple hundred holes for you?
 
JunkCJ6 said:
Make up some type of buried treasure story and have the guys from Oak Island come in and drill/core a couple hundred holes for you?
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Best idea yet. Get a bunch of trinkets and seed the yard so the metal detector guy doesn’t have the do it!
 
ThePanzerFuhrer said:
Best idea yet. Get a bunch of trinkets and seed the yard so the metal detector guy doesn’t have the do it!
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Even better..... After you seed the yard call Discovery Channel and make up a wild ass story about land pirates burying treasure on that property. Get them to pay you. :laughing:
 
I don’t really have any experience with the granite in your area, but I do have a bunch of experience in the Piedmont Province. In Piedmont we can definitely tell the difference between weathered rock (commonly referred here as PWR) and competent rock with an air-track. Sound of the hammer hitting and watching the drill string advance. One of the main ways we tell where we can end bear our drilled shafts is by predrilling each location with an air-track. Got a real big job going right now where the air-track is telling us if the rock is good for 240,000 lb/sf allowable bearing or not.

The boring cost you were quoted doesn’t sound out of line with what the going rates are in my area.

I would caution to be careful correlating data from nearby sites. I have seen competent rock vary by a metric shit ton on a single site, let alone from adjacent sites. All depends how the rock was folded, cracked etc. You could be in a highly folded area and your PWR could be 80’ thick where it is 10’ not far away. If I was spending my cash I would start with an air-track exploration.
You might find some stuff of use here https://www.usgs.gov/products/maps/geologic-maps. If I am in an unfamiliar area I always start with google earth and USGS maps.
 
I don't know much about drilling (other than how to fix the rigs), but here's a thought...

Could you percussive drill for ten feet, then :mr-t: rig a 12 inch core drill, extract, then rinse and repeat (every so often take a core sample). You'd have to pull your string of rods to swap out.

You don't need to core the entire thing like when looking for a gold vein.

Also, isn't there a type of exploration drill that gives you gravel (not a solid core, but not cuttings either).
 
We have a old IR rotary rig at work we would try to trade for a telehandler. It might spin a core barrel but supposedly it pretty easy to determine consolidation from the reverse circulation cuttings (I hate rocks so that's as much help as I can give). If you want legit cores it's going to be expensive and time consuming.
 
I’d use a CME850 (track) Geotech rig with HQ3 wireline for what you want to do. This is Diamond bit coring that yields a 2-3/8 inch diameter core. You’ll need a water source to for cooling the bit. In fact this is exactly what we use for quarry exploration. Sounds like you know air track, MR and auger will not do what you want, no recovery and/or won’t drill rock. OTD cost is around $60-80/ft here on the west coast if you have enough footage on a given site, like several hundred feet. If you want 50’ at each of several sites that require loading the rig up and hauling it to another site, you might be in the $100/ft neighborhood.

HQ core will give better recovery for lab testing than the Winkle or backpack rigs. Those are 1970’s technology and probably won’t give you what you want and if they are charging $100/ft for soil, someone is getting screwed.

Tell the neighbors you’re helping the .gov determine groundwater levels. Lay people don’t know drill rigs.
 
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