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Volume 045-4 - October 1991 (8 pages)
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Page: of 8
jamming. This was done by means of the long rods,
called spoons, of which a number are shown.
The next tunnel display shows a Leyner drill in
action. This was an air operated drill which replaced the
hand operated drills we saw in the previous display. The
drill was served by two hoses, one to provide compressed
air for power, the other to provide water to wash the
debris out of the hole and incidentally keep the dust
down which was always troublesome in the mines.
The third tunnel contains a stoper, a device to drill
upwards. It worked very much like the Leyner drill. The
people who loaded the ore in the cars were called
muckers.
The stoper is called by various names, depending on
which part of the country one comes from. In this area it
was called a "wiggle tailed stoper." In Montana it was
called a "buzzy" and in Arizona a "widow maker."
28
Hence, one could tell where a miner came from by the
name he gave to the drill.
The last tunnel display shows an area, ready for
blasting. The hole pattern shown was drilled for tunneling, for blasting straight ahead.
Occasionally, a former miner will remark that the
are too many holes in this wall. However, this displa™
was designed with Empire mine in mind. In this mine, t.rock was so hard that additional holes were needed.
The dynamite boxes were opened with wooden mallets
and wedges, which are also shown. The poles were used
to push the dynamite into the hole. Two kinds of fuses,
used to explode the dynamite are also shown.
The rock which had been mined was first sorted
underground and again at the head frame. There the
valuable ore was dumped over grizzly bars, iron bars
spaced at about six inches. Rock which could not pass
through the grizzly bars was crushed and dumped on the
grizzlies again. From the grizzly, the rock passed into the
bins at the head frame.
From these bins, the ore was transported to the stamp
mills. A bank of stamp mills was a unit of five stamps.
Stamp mills were usually built in units of ten stamps.
Most mills had an even number of stamps, for example,
80 at the Empire, 40 at the North Star, which were later
increased to 60 and 20 each at the Idaho, Brunswick,
Golden Center and Pennsylvania mines.
The individual stamps varied in weight, they were
usually 850 to 1600 pounds when new; they lost about
100 pounds as the shoes wore down. The stamps at the
Empire mine were larger, they weighed 1780 pounds,
when new. The Empire battery of 80 stamps could cru
400 ton of ore per day. >
At another location in the museum there is a
working model of a stamp mill.