Exploration Drilling Insights

And your drilling programme is stationary because a relatively inexpensive component failed and the replacement is sitting in a warehouse 8,000 kilometres away.

Diamond core drilling can reach considerable depths during mineral exploration.

So you've bought an Air Core drill rig. Excellent. Can you drill yet? Probably not. Because a drill rig without the correct compressor, rods, tooling, sampling equipment, consumables and spares is essentially a very expensive piece of machinery waiting for the rest of its friends to arrive. This is one of the most common mistakes when exploration companies start buying drilling equipment. Everyone focuses on the rig. Nobody gets excited about hoses. Until the hose stops the p

Used in the right ground, however, Air Core drilling can be a brutally efficient way of turning a huge exploration area into a much smaller list of targets worth chasing.

A diamond drill hole can become unstable when the surrounding formation cannot support itself after drilling.

PQ gives you more core. NQ gives you a smaller hole. HQ sits somewhere in the middle.

Deep hole, groundwater, large diameter, elevation—and a compressor selected because somebody found a cheap one sitting in a yard?

CED manufactures and supplies both RC and diamond drilling equipment.

So if you're budgeting a mineral exploration programme and trying to understand diamond drilling cost per metre, forget looking for one magic number.