Insights
Technical articles, site reviews and commentary from the Techtonic team — open pit and underground. Most begin life as a post on our LinkedIn page; this is where they stay.
How Underground Mining Methods Are Actually Selected
There are maybe six sensible ways to mine an underground hard rock orebody. Pick the wrong one and you pay for it every day for a decade or two.
Strings: The Core of Mine Design
Points are data. Strings are design. A 0.1 m gap invisible at 1:1000 becomes a hole in your DTM, and then a problem in your volumes.
Open Pit and Underground Are Different Businesses
An open pit is a volume business. An underground mine is a chess game where the board fights back.
Points: Where Every Mine Design Begins
Bad points give you bad strings, bad strings give you bad surfaces, and bad surfaces give you volumes nobody can trust.
What We Actually Do Underground
The consulting industry has earned a reputation: arrive, present, invoice, vanish. Here is how we are built to be the opposite.
Meet Anil Taliyakula
Two decades from drill-and-blast benches to management-level planning across gold, nickel, lithium, iron ore and bauxite.
Meet the Underground Lead
Every underground manager has one rule they would paint on the crib room wall. Ours is two words long.
Introducing Techtonic Underground
Not a service line bolted onto the open pit team, but dedicated underground capability with the people and resources behind it.
Brendon Poon appointed Lead Principal Mining Engineer
Brendon will lead our mining engineering capability, support the development of the team, and drive delivery for clients across the resources sector.
Mine Design File Structure and Management
Most mine designs do not fail because of bad engineering. They fail because of bad data — wrong file, wrong version, wrong folder.
Mine Design File Types and Structure
Grids, strings, surfaces and block models, and what the file extensions in Vulcan, Deswik and Surpac actually do. Wrong file means wrong data, and it is easier to do than most engineers admit.
Charging and Powder Factor
A drill pattern is only half the job. Geometry decides where the energy goes; charging decides how much there is and how it behaves.
The Fundamentals of Drill Pattern Design
Hole diameter, burden, spacing, subdrill and stemming are the foundations of every blast. They are also completely interdependent, which is why most patterns end up balanced rather than optimised.
Meet Simon Taylor
A geologist turned mine planner on why the geological model is the single most important input into any mine plan.
Where Daily Execution and Short-Term Planning Diverge
The gap between the daily plan and the quarterly plan rarely shows up as a single failure. It compounds quietly until someone has to intervene to get crusher feed back.
Ramp Design Trade-offs in Open Pits
Ramp geometry drives stripping ratios, fleet productivity, cycle times and scheduling flexibility. Most ramp decisions are made early and paid for over the life of the pit.
Choosing the Right Explosive
There is no universal explosive. The choice is a balance between energy, water resistance, safety and cost, and getting it wrong costs you fragmentation, money, or both.
Production Drill Rig Types: Choosing the Right Rig for the Rock
Rotary, top hammer and down-the-hole rigs each suit different ground. The decision is usually made once, at the start of an operation, and everything downstream lives with it.
Meet Ahmad Al Bahadiri
Ahmad is known on site for identifying issues early, so that plans translate into execution rather than being changed on the fly.
Why Weekly Mine Plans Fail
Weekly spatial compliance under 80% usually gets blamed on geology or on the crews. Across dozens of short-term plans, the same three constraints come up instead — and none of them are execution failures.
