Re: Michigan Tech Off-season Revised - Onward and Upward
Not sure if you been on the Quincy mine tour recently. A while back they built a cog railway starting behind the hoist building which takes you down about 600 vertical feet below the shaft house where you board a tractor / wagon and drive horizontally into the mine for the actual tour. Below that point (the next 5000+ ft) the shafts are flooded.
The quantity of vein copper in the ground during the mining boom was quite interesting to me. One of Larry's lecture points that always stuck with me was the miners' biggest challenge - making the sections of the extremely malleable pure copper small enough to fit into the hoist cars and handling them underground. When I went to pick out my copper specimens, the seller had a chunk of float copper about 2' x 2' x 0.5' and I could barely pick it up. I can't imagine trying to move a piece the size of a small car around underground... by the light of a couple candles. Those miners certainly earned every dollar they put in their pockets.
Ryan J
Originally posted by ColoToot
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The quantity of vein copper in the ground during the mining boom was quite interesting to me. One of Larry's lecture points that always stuck with me was the miners' biggest challenge - making the sections of the extremely malleable pure copper small enough to fit into the hoist cars and handling them underground. When I went to pick out my copper specimens, the seller had a chunk of float copper about 2' x 2' x 0.5' and I could barely pick it up. I can't imagine trying to move a piece the size of a small car around underground... by the light of a couple candles. Those miners certainly earned every dollar they put in their pockets.
Ryan J
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