Figured it was about time for another update. So far has been an interesting, albeit busy, week. Managed to fix a satellite telephone on Monday morning, even if I did have to run a 6 meter ribbon cable through a trawler.
I then went and did the usual other jobs which one does, and then mid afternoon was advised that I would be going out to Dawson mine the next day to help run a cable up a dragline boom. Shouldn't be too bad, it's only... 100 meters in the air.
We decided it would be prudent to preassemble the cables in their armoured conduit that afternoon, and I would take the completed 105 meter loom up as one.
Well... long story short, several hours later, we managed to get the cables fed down 105 meters of conduit, which I then proceeded to roll onto a spare cable drum which was luckily sitting nearby doing nothing. Once I had the cable ready to go I proceeded to attempt to locate a suitable vehicle to take it out to the mine. Again, long story shortened somewhat, the plan was hatched that we would load the cable drum into the mazda bravo, which was going out on a job that night, and I was to take the 100 series cruiser home where I would unload my tools. The idea was that the bravo would come back into town after their job ended about half 3, and they would swap vehicles and leave me the bravo to take and they would make the cruiser disappear.
Simple in theory I'm sure.
Except come 4:00 when I went to load the vehicle, it still looked remarkably like a landcruiser, and not a bravo. I did however notice that the cable drum had magically appeared in the back of it...
I ended up ringing the supervisor, and it transpired that the blokes in the bravo still had issues at the site and needed to go back, so they drove 1.5 hours back to Gladstone to drop off my cable so they could go back to their job and I could go to mine.
(The cruiser was booked for a service that day, which is why I wasn't going to take it originally.)
So eventually I ended up at Moura with the cruiser and the cable. I met up with the on site tech, and we loaded the cable to his vehicle and drove off to the dragline.
Once we found the dragline and signed in, we scoped out the job and attempted to hatch a cunning plan, as we had 100 meters of heavy armored conduit which we needed to get 100 meters up the boom and cabletied with steel ties all the way down.
After a bit of thought and a lot of head scratching we determined the most logical course of action would be to bring the cable up from the bottom of the stairs, in as longer sections as we could drag.
So, we unravelled 105 meters of this cable out on the ground below the dragline in a large s snake shape, and I climbed to the first section with a rope and lowered it down to be attached to the end of the cable. I pulled the rope up to where I could grab the cable, and then proceeded to walk my way up the boom dragging the cable as I went. After about 20 meters it got too heavy to pull, so you worked your way down to the bottom and grabbed the next 20 meters, and so on, until all 105 meters was up on the bottom of the stairs.
At this point the onsite tech and I took turns at walking the rest of boom several times in 20 meter stretches... and to make matters more interesting we also had to feed it around several obstacles in the way on the ascent.
About 5 hours later, we finally had the cable to the top of the dragline, where we terminated it to the camera and started the process of cable tieing it all the way down the boom.
We were supposed to be removing the old cable run, but we got to the first cable attachment and discovered it was physically bolted to the boom with a metal clamp, and the nut was rusted. We mucked around with it for a while, and then I looked at the next one which was also rusted, and it slowly dawned on us that there was one clamp per foot, totalling approximately 300 for the length of the boom, and 90% of them were stuck. I looked at the on site tech and we decided if they wanted the old cable down, they could flaming well do it themselves. (It was about 39.5 degrees up where we were.)
Once we got the cable to the bottom of the boom it was a relatively easy job to get it inside the dragline house, and into the main camera room. Over the entire 305 meter length preassembled the day before, and starting at the top of the boom and working downwards... we were only 5 mm out at the bottom. 5mm! We could not of possibly got it any closer if we had even measured it.
So, once inside, we terminated that end and plugged it in, and what do you know it actually worked. Thankfully.
Turns out they are dropping the boom to rerun all the cabling in 3 months time anyhow, they tell us after we had done the job... but that's the mine logic for you.
I'll post a pic of the dragline cable path, looking downwards from the top as unfortunately I forgot to take any photos from the bottom looking up.
So, that was my adventure for the day. Not a job I would want to undertake every day, but an interesting one to add to the ever growing list of "jobs experienced".
Oh, and here's a link to a shovel video I took while we were there and uploaded to youtube: Click here for Shovel Video
TTFN
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