THE DIAMOND ROCK DRILL

The deep drilling of rock both for oil and other minerals is a basic part of the development of world-power economy. The strategic importance of oil need hardly be stressed, equally, without the diamond rock drill only surface or near-surface sources of oil would have been tapped, and modern civilization would have been very much the poorer as a result. Certainly, the handful of diamonds used in the deep drilling machinery are of strategic importance and are directly responsible for creation of a vast amount of wealth in the form of i recovered oil fuel.

All deep holes are drilled by using 3 stone diamond ring crown drills, and each year many many miles of exploratory holes are drilled in the search for minerals. It used to be stated in books dealing with the subject that the rotary diamond rock drill was invented in 1862 by R. Leschot of Switzerland. We have, however, discovered a much earlier illustration of rock drilling, with diamond, which is as follows. We found in the celebrated Encyclopaedia of Diderot, published in Paris in 1751. The text which accompanies this tells us that it represents a miner drilling a hole to be filled with gunpowder for blasting ore. We are told that the workman is using an iron bar with diamond octahedra set in the bottom, in rows, and that the tool is alternately raised and dropped, being meanwhile rotated. A hole about 2 feet long is drilled and then charged with gunpowder.

This is certainly a primitive diamond rock drill, and from this early kind there have now evolved both thin-walled diamond bits for drilling masonry and also massive bits for driving deep into rock in the search for oil.

The diamond bits for mining and civil engineering are essentially variants (and there are very many variants) of the arrangement. Individual diamonds are fixed in the 'crown' of a massive hollow metal cylinder. The crown may be segmented, with diamonds in each separate segment. As the drill goes down, a ‘core’ is forced through the central hollow tube and this gives the geologist valuable information about the rock section.

There is tremendous variety both in the shape of crown and also in the size and number of diamonds. Equally, there are various methods of encasing the diamonds. A crown may be 1 inch across with four diamonds each of ½-carat size, or it may be 14 inches across with numerous diamonds each of 5-carat size. Many drill crowns can consist of several hundred small diamonds, and some experimental crowns have used bonded arrangements of coarse grit.

In practice, diamonds are torn out and lost, and some drill heads are built of separate segments which can be replaced as the units are damaged.
For drilling short distances in rock or for drilling masonry in buildings, it is common practice to use drill bits with impregnated grit in the tip instead of single diamonds. If you want to buy diamond wedding bands visit this site.