Hand Mining Coober Pedy Opal part 1

in this video we just put some videos together a bit of hand mining at cooper pd and um if you want to see some of the results from this when we get back home check out part two of the tumbling of the opal that we've found thanks for watching hey everyone mark from michael west yeah i just thought i'd show you a little bit of this trace we've been chasing in the morning it's very skinny but it's starting to um change a bit it was just basically chalky now it's starting to thicken up bit tricky to capture starting to get multiple veins coming up now so i'll just keep picking away at that and um yeah it's slowly getting thicker so hopefully it'll turn into some good color okay so i'm still chasing this bit of trace three a bit tricky to juggle a few things at the same time lost very very skinny pieces of opal through nice color through it a bit hard to see on the camera and we came around this little corner and um little baby bellamite which is an ancient squid tube so um yeah we'll get that out of the wall insects see what it's like i think it's got some blues and greens in it so nothing overly specky but um still pretty cool okay so we got it out finally and nice little pillow might see it lights up pretty well it's very small it's only even a 20 mil by eight mil round but um it's got some reds in it actually and a skin of green so um yeah it's not a bad little find and there's still plenty of trace coming through and i think the rest of that velomite's still in the wall so we'll try and dig that out okay so we're still chasing that little bellamy um it is definitely in the wall still i've actually just snapped the tip off it so it might actually be good size it's definitely got some natural inclusions in it it's broken inside believe it or not that is the rest of it there you can see it's iron stones covered over it um it actually goes back into the wall so it's really hard to see so it's had a natural break um so to dig that out we're just using you can just get these um see that's the tip of it it's basically for putting o-rings in hydraulic seals and things i use one of those quite a bit to scratch around get it out delicately if you want this is the first thing i used to use is basically just a flat blade screwdriver stick it in the vise like a bit of map gas on it heat it up and just bend it and that's a great scraping tool as well so um you can get into it pretty cheaply open mining up here at cooper petty just grab yourself a prospecting license um keep out of my claim that would be nice i'm getting ratted out every time i come up here but you get that but anyway yeah grab yourself prospecting losses there's tons of open drives and tunnels and all sorts of stuff you can play around with and plenty of opal if you spend the time and just scratch around finding a bit of trace anyway we'll keep digging this out and see what we can find if only that was cmo paul you'll need to light up pretty well still chasing this bit of trace i've got the big black light out this time and um yeah down this side it's getting chunkier that's good to see lots of color in that too nice bit of opal so anyway i'll try and get that out it's in a bit of a tricky spot i've got to gouge a heap more out to get to it so try and get that and see what it looks like all righty so this is thickening up which is a bit of a bonus so we'll just dig underneath that and um get it out some beautiful reds in it and i found the other side of that um bellamot pot too which is red and a green cover over it so i'll take all this stuff home i'm in a bit of a rush haven't got all my gear with me this trip so i'm just gonna throw all this rough stuff in a bucket and take it home to the tumbler and um see what comes out of it when we get home okay check this out i don't know if you can see it the spotlight's right on it now this actually got thick in its color and i'll just try and get the lighter up again oh yeah it's really juggling i'm stuck in this little hole so anyway so this um opal's opened up to a bit of nice beautiful seams so happy days crystal opal green and blue so and a little bit of red in it so hopefully it'll open up knowing my luck it'll just disappear okay so what i'll do now is just get this chisel put it in up top and we'll hammer it out and try and get it out in one piece yeah some of this um trace is starting to thicken up again so that's a good [Music] [Music] [Music] there is absolutely no way this is going to come out in one piece this ground is cracky as anything coming out in chunks so anyway here's what it is we'll take it out in bits you

Channel: Opal Quest

Views: 22,402

Rating: 4.9235668 out of 5

Keywords: Australian Opal, Opal mining, Coober Pedy Opal mining, Hand mining, Tumbling opal, Opal process, Opal journey, Opal Hunter, Opal love, Uv Light, White opal, Rough opal, outback opal, Blacklighting, Coober Pedy claim, Opal claim, Opal information, Opal Quest, Black opal, Direct opal, Miner direct, Aussie digger, Jewellery making, Finding opal, Real opal mining, Gem hunter, opal gem, noodling, how to opal

Id: UYUQUcdLAL4

Length: 7min 7sec (427 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021