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Illustration showing how a open pit mining can look like, seen from the above
1.Wassara’s straight drilling enables longer blast holes, hence increased bench heights in open-pit mining 2.Shorter bench heights with top hammer

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.

Increased productivity

When the top hammer is used for drilling blast holes in open pit mining and quarries, the bench height is usually limited by the hammer's accuracy. With Wassara, 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.

Parallel and exact pre-splits

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.

Precise dewatering holes

The straightness of Wassara also enables very precise positioning of the long dewatering holes, which reduces the mining operation's overall cost of the water handling.