Coober Pedy Opal, opal rough, cut opal, crystal opal, Single stones and  parcels, red and, green opal, opal set in jewellery all available from Desert Fire Opal, all Australian ....

$$All prices in US Dollars$$

 

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These opal miners are working on the Olympic field, pulling dirt from underground with the blower and then noodling the dirt with their noodling machine

Here is a another view of a noodling machine: the loader puts the dirt in the hopper at the front and the dirt then moves through the rotary sieve which removes all the dust and small stones. The remainder of the dirt drops onto a conveyor belt to be sorted out under a UV light.  This ultra violet light makes the opal fluorescent.

This is a noodler and loader.  The yellow trailer is the generator plant - it looks like a second hand lion cage from the travelling circus!.

Great care has to be taken on the opal field as there are holes everywhere as the following pictures show.

Even in the middle of the road. (everybody knows that when you are driving around on the opal fields you are driving over millions of dollars-well they decided to see if that was the case )

This is our blower we are using it to open up a blind shaft. When we make a connection to the other shaft 15ft away we will put in our elevator set which is a lot cheaper to run.

Front view of tunnelling machine disks spinning at great speed with tungsten teeth cutting the face while the whole arm rotates around the centre bit, shaving sandstone from the face as it goes

Rear view of machine with dirt feeding onto conveyor underneath

Conveyor line feeding into elevator buckets and up the shaft to the surface. Notice the falling level in the wall behind the elevator buckets, This is falling away from the slide where it starts to flatten out - this is where the opal is meant to be. But wasn't !!!