LKAB Wassara's high-accuracy drilling allows for an increased bench height and a higher amount of successful pre-splits, while at the same time reducing overall costs.
When the top hammer is used for drilling blast holes in open pit mining and quarries, the bench height is usually limited by the hammers accuracy. With the Wassara-hammers, not only can the bench height be increased, but also the size of each blast.
This increases the overall productivity since the total amount of blasts can be decreased, resulting in lower operating costs.
Parallel holes also improve fragmentation, which further improve the productivity throughout the mucking, crushing and grinding processes.
To improve the stability of the slopes it is common that a pre-split, i.e. closely spaced blast holes, are drilled. These holes must remain parallel and should not deviate from the plane of the proposed slope. Since the Wassara-hammer has the highest drilling accuracy of any currently available production drilling methods, it is the obvious choice for accomplishing a successful pre-split.
The straightness of Wassara-hammers also enables very precise positioning of the long dewatering holes, which reduces the mining operation’s overall cost of the water handling.
