DRILL & BLAST
Donnelly Blasting Services’ Epiroc SmartROC T40 smart rig, fitted with silenced kit boom, at Fulton Hogan’s Blue Rock Quarry.
COMPLETE PACKAGE RIG EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS
A drill rig has set a new in-house record for the manufacturer with the number of metres drilled and litres consumed in one shift. Damian Christie spoke to Daniel Kirwan, of Epiroc, and father and son Jason and Dan Donnelly, of Donnelly Blasting Services, about their SmartROC T40 smart rig.
D
onnelly Blasting Services (DBS) is headquartered in Jimboomba, in southeast Queensland. The Australianowned, family-run business conducts work in numerous quarries and construction and dam projects in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales, with about 80 per cent of its clients being quarries. The company offers the full rock on ground service. To quote Dan Donnelly, “we do everything in-house – the surveying, markout, boretrack design, shotfiring, monitoring, and drilling”. His father and company founder Jason added: “We float our rigs, mark our own holes, survey, drill our own holes, load the fire, do all the reporting, all the surveying and all the blast monitoring ourselves. For our explosives, we use Orica as a contractor but we also have our own explosives trucks.” Jason started the business 20 years ago after he spent 10 years as a shotfirer for Orica Mining Services. He wanted to pursue
a career as a part-time contract shotfirer but ultimately formed a business that today employs 30 staff, including around 20 drill operators, and keeps him busy full-time. DBS has a modern fleet of Epiroc smart rigs and specialised rigs that can be configured for special project requirements. Added to that are mobile manufacturing units (or ANFO trucks) with augering and blowloading capabilities, a 25-tonne excavator with rock breaker and a 30-tonne widening tri-axle low loader. Jason said the company has built its reputation on flexibility, which is “we’re able to do what the customer wants”. “We have GPS guidance on our rig – a lot of the larger rock on ground services don’t have that,” he said. “We can control the whole outcome because we do the whole job. We put the extra holes in, we control the drilling [with machine guidance] – we understand what’s going on with the drilling. We have the latest technologies in the drills,
so we’re saving our customers money. Some other companies can use up to 400 or 500 litres of fuel a day – we’re down to below 200. We work with our customers for a better outcome.” DBS’s association with drill rig manufacturer and supplier Epiroc covers nearly the whole lifetime of the business. “We started with Ingersoll-Rand, which was bought by Atlas Copco,” Jason recalled. “It’s been a long association but we’ve probably used Atlas Copco [now Epiroc] for 15 years. We ended up changing to them from another brand for the technology, fuel burn, operator comfort, reliability and product support.”
SOUND OF SILENCE DBS’s 20-strong Epiroc/Atlas Copco drill rig fleet comprises manual-operated PowerROC T35s, as well as numerous smart rigs that operate via machine guidance including ROC D7Cs, ROC D9Cs, and up to six SmartROC T40 rigs. The contractor has also recently Quarry February 2019 21
