Creede 4th of July hand-drilling contest 2008

Example of how contestants try to drill a hole in solid rock using just a hammer and a steel chisel.

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Travel & Events

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• wierd
• contest
• mining
• drilling
• 4th
• of
• July

[ss2jwp]

Scott Havens is the World Record holder, he set the record in 1993. I know it for a fact he is my wife's uncle.



[MrCrazyCow1]

@bernardhill1 thats not right

[isafirefighter]

The current WORLD RECORD is held by Scott Havens of Montana with 16.35 inches. Emmit has won the world the past 2 years but he has of yet to get the world record.

[bernardhill1]

the current WORLD RECORD was taken out by Emmit in 2009 with a depth of 13 2/3 inches.

Get your facts right.

[bernardhill1]

I admit that a 4lb hammer would be harder to use, as for the ten minutes against seven minutes, as we only drill in granodiorite rock which is considered to be one of the hardest rocks in the world we go for the 3lb hammer an a very high hit rate and the shock coming back through the handle wrecks your hand, I am lucky as I can use both hands.

Also the only people handsteeling over here now are uni students from the school of mines who have not been trained properly.

I was trained by old timers

[oneuniverseable]

First, the "boys" you refer to in the video do make their own steels. They do all their own smithing and use no carbides.

Second, it would be fundamentally easier to swing your hammer for seven minutes because it's approxiamately one pound lighter than the one you see being swung on this video.

Also, as I remember, we smoked an Aussie champion in 2008 at the world drilling comp by a margin of at least five inches. There, we hammer for ten minutes.

Current standing American record 16.35"

[bernardhill1]

These boys need a few lessons, I won the Australian championship for the last time in 1990.

We had to make our own drill steels out of tool steel (no tungsten allowed), the steels were shaped on the anvil, all eight of them and they had to follow each other.

We drilled for seven minutes, two hits a second for the first 6 minutes and the remaining minute was 1.1/2 hits a second.

We used a three pound hammer and we drilled into granodiorite rock, I made 8 and a quarter inches in the 7 minutes.