Is it possible to go opal mining in Coober Pedy for only 4 hours and find payable opal? Take a look!
Vložit
- čas přidán 18. 07. 2022
- Two days driving, one day in Coobs, a flying stopover with the family and I still have to go bloody opal mining, well, pillarbashing at least. It’s a problem I know, but in for a penny, in for a pound.. By some miracle I go back to an old spot I worked years ago and discovered the mine had been flooded and had newly collapsed areas that revealed some gorgeous precious opal. To be fair, we do have over 30 years of experience and i reckon a bit of help from the Big Guy, (not Joe Biden BTW) Not bad for 4 hours on a Saturday morning. One day we will find so much opal that we will be able to retire.. and go opal mining…
- Komedie
Yeah I can’t say as I blame ya, being that deep, alone, under unstable roofs, I’d be getting while the getting is good and boogying myself.
You got some real nice material and got out.
That’s a win mate.
Great rainbow candies, stay safe.
For the time I was there there are some very nice pieces. Thank you for watching!
Well done brother
Thanks mate, its always satisfying to check out a claim, even when there's not much opal.
Hey shit man, that was really cool, put a smile on me dial, well done 🤙
Haha, thanks legend. It was fun to make!
Great Video , wow that looks like a lot of fun
Yes it certainly can be! No one to bug you down the hole! 😊
I got the urge to go opal mining ...
No opal in England
A M A Z I N G..............wish you many of those days
Thank you! It was fun. 😀
Nice Pieces...
Thank you! Some have rubbed up very nice and should make some lovely jewelry.
Woooooooow brother
Great job sir what a lovely find. Please don't get killed over opal! Looks very dodgy. Great vid. 👏👏👏
Thank you for watching! You’re right, it can be very dodgy, but it really is like any dangerous construction job etc, where complacency is the real reason most accidents happen. We always consider the safety impact of our digging on the support structures etc.
Wow, what a day
Absolutely! Wish they were all like that!
@@Opaldigger yes but with a safer roof 🤣🤣
Truly blessed to be able to go and find and bring these beautiful gems to light! Stay safe and safe digging from Gulf Shores Alabama
Thank you! Yes count myself truly blessed to be able to do this. And thank you for watching!
Well done
Thanks mate, it was a fun morning.
That was cool 😎👍💯
Bril! Thanks for watching!
My grandfather went to coober pedy many years ago. I have a few peice of rough opal he picked up. I hope to polish it up one day. Not sure it is worth anything but a nice memory. Who knows.. make a pin for one of my Akubra hats! :)
Nice to see where it actually comes from.
Awesome, thanks mate, its one of those places many, many people have come for an opal hunt and taken home memories that can last lifetimes for sure. Thanks for watching!
Wow absolutely awesome
Thanks for watching! 😃
@@Opaldigger it’s always awesome watching your shows
@@michaelbehrendt9190 You’re too kind. Cheers mate.
Coober Pedy is a totally unique place I miss it and can’t wait to get back there one day soon
some great looks rock mate great colour
Cheers mate, scrubbed up bloody well for a mornings effort!
@@Opaldigger yes mate very good do you sell or cut them your self
@@pkgoldopalhunting There are several small rough parcels dropping on our stores soon but we will look at the tops more closely before deciding how to proceed. The best will most likely find it’s way into gold and silver id say.
Are you guys in Coober Pedy at the moment? Good you guys are finding stuff, keep all the great work up.
Cheers mate, no we were there last weekend for a day only, we were also up at the same time as you about a week before when you started your last series, good stuff!
Amazing.
Cheers for watching mate!
Nice!
Cheers mate! Thanks for watching!🙏😊
super awesome!!!!!!!
Cheers for watching mate!
I want ta go look myself .. its stunning material ...
It’s possible! The Coober Pedy opal fields are huge! We visited a few times in the mid 80’s and slowly learned the ropes before going full time.
Not bad at all!
Sweet
Cheers for the view mate. 😀
Unbelievable to stumble on buried treasure so easily
Very nice; just sitting there, waiting for YOU!
Was it the original Hans Peak or Hans Peak Extension up on the Southern Rise? I mined the latter in a claim next to the Greeks who found multies circa 1990 and turned that area into a pine forest of pegs in the space of a weekend.
2 slips from our claim carrying thin gemmy trace (a bit like what you found) intersected in THEIR claim, not ours of course, shat themselves and made multiple lines of beautiful stuff. Oddly, a lot of it had cotton in it, even the best of it, and it faced better from the side than the top. I believe a lot of it was chopped up for inlay.
Again, congrats.
Yes mate, it’s the south western corner of New Hans Peak, I misspoke in the video, not deliberately, but in my ranting I said Old instead of New. I know most of those blokes, the storied of the Greeks (Nick the Baker) and partners finding inches thick crystal around the shafts are legendary..
Cotton is the #1 problem here but there always seems to be a trade off hey, it’s either diamonds like parts of Olympic, 8 Mile or Andamooka, where its almost impossible to find, or you can dig kilos of cracky stuff on Zorba Extension or cottony crystal in Hans Peak or 11 Mile.. I think that's why I like Old 15 Mile so much, still very clean and relatively stable material but not so hard to find, well that ued to be the case anyway..
I’m pretty happy as I will slice most of this parcel up for doublets, cotton and all and see how they go as pendants and earrings. Still very beautiful but certainly not top dollar.. I wish I was mining seriously in those days but I was just a kid noodling the dumps and hearing the stories..
@@Opaldigger We were originally set up (tunnelling machine, blower) at the Southern end of a N-S 100x50 claim with little success. We cut through one beautiful thin vertical running at 90degrees to the drive, but knew nothing about verticals' direction back then and kept going past it. There were 3 groups of us including Nick's team and another mob well to the W of the Extension. I knew one of the blokes from that partnership and they were doing well, but had it pegged out all around.
I went away one weekend (girlfriend in Pt. Augusta) and came back to madness --- pegs, Utes, drills, 4WDs everywhere --- after the Greeks had let it out what they'd found.
The RUSH was on!! Not as big nor nearly as productive as Zorba Extension (the New and New-New Fields, LOL 😄) a few years before but several groups found dough.
We drilled two shafts about 2-3m apart in the NE corner of our claim close to the Greeks and brought up a lot of material on 3 levels; a lot of dry-looking thick grey potch in the top level, thin blue-green crystal in the middle level and pretty red-grey from the bottom. Don't remember depths. Something is telling me the crystal level was about 66', would that be right?
Anyway, one of the shafts also brought up a red-grey, munted shell worth about $200. NOTHING special. All up, about $400, pretty good for 2 shafts. By the time we got back into town on dusk to have a beer at the Opal Inn, the rumour-mill had gone wild and plenty of blokes came up and slapped our backs/shook our hands, because --- get this --- they'd "heard" we'd drilled up 20 grand's worth of red-blue 🤩🤩.
HA! 😆
Within a week, 2 prominent Greek buyers offered us 50K for the claim, based on no evidence at all since they had not seen what we drilled up. They must have spoken to Nick, next door. True story; I knew them well. There were 4 of us. We took a vote and knocked it back, unanimously, cocky/confident it was going to do much better than that.
The joke was on us.
After 8 months, breakdowns after breakdowns, endless in-fighting over % and where to drive (was nuts!), we found 65K all up. Divvied up 4 ways after expenses it was not even decent wages.
The two slips we had carried trace only, pretty but skinny and shot with cotton. Those two slips' levels bottomed out and intersected about 15m from our NE corner. The Greeks got the bonanza.
I was disappointed by the yield, but happy when that corner dried up and we went our separate ways. 😐
I heard a while later that one of the four of us (original claim-owner) went back and worked the bottom level which would have been easy since it was only about 2-3 feet in our floor, and did well, apparently. Nice, quiet bloke. Goodonim.
@@mikeoliver5671 Brilliant insights mate! I remember those days well, 92-94? Not sure as I said I was just going there noodling a lot. Your story is incredibly salient as the experience of the vast majority of companies. It’s harder to find a good partnership than opal and even if you do find it, once split up it’s often barely wages. Dr Kami finding 300k every few years and people would be jealous when each partner would be better off holding lollipops on road works. I didn’t measure but it certainly felt like the mid 60s where I was digging. One day it would be nice to be in the excitement of a rush but I seem to have done my best on the fringes and out of the way. Thanks again! Do you mind if I copy your story to my blog page at worldclassopal.net about this video?
@@Opaldigger P.S. re this:
"I know most of those blokes, the storied of the Greeks (Nick the Baker) and partners finding inches thick crystal around the shafts are legendary.".
I got to know Nick pretty well. We used their ream shaft to get our tunnelling machine down and went 50-50 on the opal we found driving into our connected shafts, so our claims were connected. Cheerful bloke, hard worker. I saw some of their best stuff, about 18-20mm thick, 10c to 50c sized pieces (some bigger), gem red-blue, gorgeous stuff, but even that stuff was shot with cotton. What amounted to big money was the volume that they found. Hundreds of ounces of tops 🤩😍.
Nick was one lucky bastard.
A couple years later, he teamed up with a couple of Croatians at the NW end of East Pacific extension and found eye-boggling vertical-bricks the size of shoe boxes (I have photos) of red-grey. Their better stuff was smaller and looked a lot like 8-mile. A few people would've done their dough on that stuff. Most turned out to be cracky (it was at the most Southern end of the Zorba Extensions). I bought their small chips about which they'd been careless, leaving the gemmy small stones in with the grey. After selling me two baby-baths of chips 😯 they woke up and priced it out of my range.
Here's the irony; my mate and I had the claim next door, again! They had two slides facing each other, making a trough of opal-carrying motherlode and told us it ran towards our claim.
We were crazy-hopeful, opened up and drove thataway, finding grey verticals running towards them which we assumed would turn to colour as we got closer to the boundary.
WRONG.
As if drawn by a ruler, another slide cut off the corridor facing into their claim, smack-bang on the boundary. All of our (worthless) grey material, thousands of ounces, was behind that slide in our claim. 😱😭
That's how I found out that opal's where it IS, and never where it ain't.
It's funny looking back, but at the time --- heartbreak.
@@mikeoliver5671 oh man, that IS heartbreaking. Nick was my first boss at the old bakery after a few odd Jobs for Ross Chatfield. I bumped into him and Maxine at Costco a couple of months ago and have been meaning to drop into their cafe. That sounds like Hoobin claim. Another legendary patch!
That was awesome how dose the Average person get to do this. It’s been a dream of mine to do.
If you can get to Coober Pedy Australia, it’s probably the easiest place to be able to go down an opal mine. I’d say getting to know the locals and going with an experienced miner is the best idea to start with as it can be very dangerous if you’re not aware of what can go wrong.
Why do you have reflective stuff on your finger?
I think it just looks that way because my left index finger is always in the saturation of the torch beam. 🤷🏻♂️
How can I purchase some of that opal
You can see the rough we have available from this lot at opalauctions/stores/worldclassopal We throw in extras with all of our rough purchases to make sure you can get some nice stones.
Thanks for watching!
Are u in australia.
Yes, I lived in Coober Pedy for over 25 years but we now are based in Adelaide and travel about 970km to Coober Pedy as often as possible.
Do have a Ebay site
www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?item=121670716342&_ssn=worldclassopal&_sop=10&_ipg=100&rt=nc 😄
Are these your claims or a friends?
when you refer to "pillar bashing" dose that mean in your own claims, old claims or abandoned claims.
sorry for the questions but im going there soon to stake my own claim and are trying to get a idea of the rules before i get there.
your videos are very interesting and quite informative mate cheers
also when registering a claim how long dose it take to register, is it same day {once payed} or is there a cooling off period before you can start mining.
@@TheBonester Hey Robert!
Thanks for watching mate! We are always in our own claims that are in various states, It pretty much goes like this:
You have a PSPP (precious stones prospecting permit) from PIRSA, this means you can go to an unpegged area on the fields and put your pegs almost anywhere you like (excepting a few, rare annexed areas) you then put the date of pegging (DOP) on the pegs and have 48 hours (this skips weekends) to decide if you would like to take the next step, which is to ‘notify’ the claim. This is if you like the spot and want to stay a bit longer you can take a survey from the nearest datum peg (these are registered on the mines dept maps) to reference the exact position of the claim. This takes a bit of practice, but Nicko, Ashley, Matt or Jacquie at the mines dept will help you sort it. Once you submit your ‘notification’ form to the mines dept you have 14 days from the date of pegging to either register the claim (three months only first time for a fee depending on the size of the claim) or to pull your pegs and keep looking elsewhere.
I often just date my pegs, run around and chuck them around a spot before I jump down, if it’s a dud, pull em and run. If it’s interesting, notify, then register if it’s juicy. It’s honestly the best opal mining regs on earth and probably in history and I’m so grateful we can do it! Good luck!
@@TheBonester PS, the sizes of the claims are generally 50 by 50 m or 100 by 50 within the main working area. You can peg bigger claims outside this area but it gets a bit more involved with exploration leases etc, mines dept can sort you out again if you need that info.
@@Opaldigger oh excellent thanks for letting me know, I'm defiantly gonna give it a red hot go, i love mining and chasing valuable minerals, cant wait to get there.
Do you have any details or video of that tumbler?
No sorry mate, it’s a very simple design that a mate made about 25 years ago and I modified many years back. Did you mean you want specs or details on how it works?
@@Opaldigger yeah anything. Sizes, materials, mesh size. I see the crank handle, I'm guessing it's been motorised?
@@Halupka5 from memory it’s about a 1-2mm galvanised mesh with sheet metal galv ends folded and pop riveted, a guy called Szuk made hundreds of the tumblers in Coober Pedy in the 70’s and 80’s and this was a hand turned one my Dad bought, I adapted it to run with a standard small motor (couldn’t tell you the specs just now) and belt drive to a small reduction box. I welded a 13mm socket on the reduction box shaft with a matching square insert and at the other end instead of a bearing I just used a u bearing with a stopper flange on the barrel shaft, It has to be greased every use to stop wear and I’ve used it hundreds of times. Only in the last few years all the mesh started to rust out so I repaired it with builders epoxy cement.
Not sure if this helps!
czcams.com/video/tEa30oDOBM8/video.html
At 2.06 there’s a better vid of the whole thing mate.
@@Opaldigger yep that's fine thanks
So you're telling me that this big rock filled with opal was left there in the open by previous miners or this fell off from somewhere and no one has been mining through that time period??? Cux this is just thousands of dollars in one look
Yeah! About 6-7 months ago in February 2022 Coober Pedy had a few big rains close together which in certain low lying areas gathers and finds it’s way down shafts and into big mines. Not everywhere but in certain ‘sumps’ on the field, by the watermarks I could tell that this claim had about 7 feet of water throughout. The opal level in many claims at around 60 feet is more broken up and softer than the ground above it and the water ‘frets’ it away from the wall, only about 20 centimetres on average but it’s all though out the claim meaning any opal in that vicinity has is exposed. Someone had already checked most of this claim since the flood but I snuck past some dangerous areas that the last miner didn’t to find the opal in the video. That’s the thing with pillarbashing, if you want to find more than the last guy, you have to be prepared to go further and look harder than they did. It’s quite difficult and dangerous but can be very fun!
Yes, the old timers from 1890 whem the rush was happening, they left all the green and blue opals behind as they had no value, you can literally find spots where old timers mined and search there piles and find heaps pf opal worth 1000s
Some people think there born in the wrong body,well i know for bloody shore i've bin borne in the wrong country!! Stay safe and enjoy life mates! Greetings from down under... the waterline 🤣 netherlands .
Thanks mate, we are watching the bastards though, our hard fought and won freedoms are being treated like nothing by many of our ‘ruling elites’ time for the return of governments ‘of’ the people and ‘for’ the people, not being dictated to by unelected bureaucrats!
@@Opaldigger ones in a while a chairdance and the elite stay's where it is.. its a global thing. Me: loving people surrounding me. Doing what i want (less work would be nice) and cut opals!! 😍 let it be,luck starts in me 😉 cheers!
value?
It’s hard to tell, it was probably between 1-2k of rough field price but we cut and set almost everything so quite a decent morning once said and done!