running a day late for a pre blast rock survey in an upmarket residential area, made it just as this guy had the unenviable task of blowing out all the drill holes... we all got coated in fine granite powder and water paste.
Shot what we could with laser, dont really like the scan function on an S6, it misses out all the breaklines on the vertical rock faces, and anyway, cant seem to find any affordable software that will let you model a DTM with a convex or concave vertical face. So try not to over shoot it, but just get the main points.
Here is the modern day equivalent of dynamite along with the blue detonating cord ( cordtex), being charged down each hole. Wrap a few strands of that cortex around a tree and its timber in no time, I thinks it burns at about 3400m/s.
Blast is in 3 hours, monitoring of structures by survey means is not a biggie down here, so only quantities to calc, I think I got it to 377m3 or so, and off to the next site. 
I have recently switched from a two man crew to 3 man crew, running two robots and two network GNSS rovers, the data that we can collect in a day as opposed to the two man crew is very impressive. Travel time and lack of office time to process all the data is our bottleneck now.
Cheers
I always got a thrill watching them "shoot" rock. I asked a shooter once what it takes to get a license to do that work. Surprisingly easy. The guy told me you didn't even have to have any "real" field experience. Don't know if it's true or not since I never pursued it.
> I always got a thrill watching them "shoot" rock. I asked a shooter once what it takes to get a license to do that work. Surprisingly easy. The guy told me you didn't even have to have any "real" field experience. Don't know if it's true or not since I never pursued it.
I have surveyed alongside drill & blast crews, enjoyable. Safe worksites.
One thing to remember is to conclude surveying before they start to do the tie-in. Onc the tie-in starts, they prefer not to have a tourist walking around with a GPS and risking to trip the chords. And I never want to be there either. They need to focus on their task at hand.
The drill and blast supervisor does carry a ticket to blast. It can be revoked in a jiffy. The field crew can learn without any real field experience.
> I always got a thrill watching them "shoot" rock. I asked a shooter once what it takes to get a license to do that work. Surprisingly easy. The guy told me you didn't even have to have any "real" field experience. Don't know if it's true or not since I never pursued it.
I have an explosives license. I don't how they really verify your experience as most of that type of stuff is learned on the job. I don't know where it is taught and you get a certificate or anything like that. I had been around it for about ten years before I got my own license. It is a ton of paperwork and interviews / background checks. I had three ATF agents spend the whole day at my office asking questions when I first got my license. Per the agreement they can stop by anytime and look at our records etc without a warrant.
"...cant seem to find any affordable software that will let you model a DTM with a convex or concave vertical face..."
Try changing your coordinate frame so that the vertical surface is now the horizontal surface and use your regular software.
> I thinks it burns at about 3400m/s.
That figure stunned me enough to do a little research, and I found that Primacord burns even faster, at around 7 km per second. That's a mind-blowing rate of progression. It means you could take 4 miles of cord, run out 2 miles and loop it back, ignite one end, and a second later the the other end would be burnt. Amazing.
9 minutes 36 seconds +- from New York to L.A.
> Try changing your coordinate frame so that the vertical surface is now the horizontal surface and use your regular software.
How does this new coordinate frame fit with the remainder of his digital terrain model? Mining software such as Geocom, Minesite or Vulcan is required for that type of block modeling with overhangs. (If I understand correctly)
Went through Engineer Demolition School many decades ago. Was a "Certified Master Blaster" courtesy of the U.S. Army. The ten weeks school scared the bloody hell out of me. Fortunately for me, I never had to use my "skills."
When one of my sons was going through Army Jump School, the Drill Instructor told him that I was a "sapper."
Funny thing is, I have another son that actually is a Bomb Tech.
Nowadays, firecrackers give me the heebie jeebies.