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Drill & Blast Design
This tutorial shows how to design a drill and blast design in Promine. With an example of long
hole drill design underground using the drawing attached.
The tutorial covers:
1) Draft detail ring designs: Set up of the ring face, different ring pattern configurations,
generating multiple rings at once
2) Loading Blast Holes
3) Set up report formats: Customize reports for different purposes
4) Produce drafting sheets with drill and blast reports
The above listed subjects will allow you to create your ring designs and generate different drill &
blast reports effortlessly.
For the completion of this tutorial, the modules in Promine Essentials tab: Section and Grid will
be use, in addition to the Drill & Blast Underground in Promine Engineering.

Cutting the ring section and inserting reference line

Before starting, we should have our ring faces section ready, this is achieved with the Cut Many
Sections command in the Section module.
First, you will have to draw a reference line (center line of all your ring faces), it is usually a polyline
located at the midpoint of the back of your drift or the floor of your drift. The reference line can
later be used to mark angles of drill holes in relation to it.
It is important to cut a section that corresponds to the dipping direction of the stope

This
corresponds to
the actual This corresponds
distance to the increments
(burden) of the section
between each name
ring section

Click on pick line and

select the reference line
you drew. Check the
‘Draw reference line on
sections’ if you wish to
have reference line
position marked on each Remember to
ring face. pivot your
section cutting if
you have a
dipping stope

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 After obtaining each ring section, you may use Select Section (SECS) command to draw your
blasting contour on the section with a 2D polyline if the ore contour does not correspond to the
actual blasting contour that you need. If not, you may proceed to the next step.

Draft Detail Ring Designs

The ring designs can be accomplished with the three following steps, which correspond to the
first 3 commands in the Drill and Blast Underground module.

Insert pivot line

The pivot line should be inserted in to the drift to indicate the drillers where to position the drills
while drilling.

Method 2: Insert
based on offset

Method 3:
Method 1:
Insert Arc
Select your
pivot line
drill and
based by
position in the
entering
drift to draw
machine
the pivot line
specifications

In Promine, you may draw your pivot line for your drills with different methods:
Method 1: Draw a pivot line manually while having your boom rotate inside the drift to show you
if the position of the pivot line is feasible.

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Method 2: Automatic insert based on setting offsets from the drift. Based on the boom and drilling
machines specifications, you may already have enough information to figure out how much offset
you need. Under such circumstances, you could use method 2 to insert your pivot line. To insert
the line, select ’OK’ in the offset of drift column box, and select your drift outline. (Recommended
for this tutorial)

Pivot line
inserted
(Indicated in
Blue)

Method 3: This method allows you to insert an arc pivot line by inputting the machine
specifications.

Configure parameters
This is simply telling the program which are the outline of drift, the pivot line, and the blast outline.

Insert holes
Click on insert holes, and you will see in the command line, asking if you wish to start at the
indicated end of the pivot line (marked with yellow cross).

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Since we want to start at this end, we will click Yes.
Next, there are several ways to insert ring patterns in Promine quickly:
1) Distribute
2) Follow
3) Symmetric
4) Fan
5) Parallel
For this tutorial, we are going to use distribute between the pivot line. Indicate with your cursor
the start and end angle you wish to distribute your holes in between. After, select how many holes
you wish to insert within the range. The program will then give you the distance between collar of
the hole and the distance between the end points of the hole in the command line. If you think
this drilling pattern satisfies your engineering requirement, simply click Go to confirm and Exit to
insert the holes. The inserted holes are displayed in the following image.

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 Distributed 8 holes
within the specified
angle interval. With end
point distance at 2.0 m

You may modify the length, angle of the hole by simply selecting the hole with your cursor and
moving the hole. In addition, you may also use Edit Hole (DRIE) command and select the hole you
wish to edit the position of by simply dragging the hole.
You may transfer this ring pattern onto other ring sections easily with Copy From To in the Section
module in Promine Essentials (SECCOPY) as shown below and modify respectively the holes on
each section:

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An illustration of 5 ring sections can be seen below:

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Loading Blast Holes
Once you insert your drill holes on each ring. You may load your explosives. To do this, you may
simply click on Load Holes (DRILH). The dialogue below will allow you to configure your loading
design easily.

Select type
of explosive

Select the explosive

for your bottom load
and specify length
(Optional)

You may also define

the stage explosives
segments

Once done configurating your explosive loading design, you may select the collar position (or click
enter to select the default), and use your cursor to select the holes you wish to load in your
drawing.

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Once done, you will see your holes loaded as the following:

After loading the holes, you may insert a blasting report that shows you the explosive type and
material (kg) used, as well as other relevant blasting information. To learn how to insert blasting
report you may follow the steps in the Produce drafting sheets with reports using a “Blasting
report type”.

Set Up Report Formats

Before diving into printing reports, we will first set up report formats. A typical report format will
include the columns as in the table below.

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Select the column items in the report
In Promine, you may configure different reports (drilling, blasting or bolting.. etc) in Options of drill
and blast underground module (DRIPREF).
You may click on customize reports to customize the items you wish to include in your report, as in
the following image.

This is where you may

configure your drills,
diameters, and explosives

Next, you will see this dialogue box below:

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 Name of your Click on the arrow to
report add or remove items
from the report

This top green boxed area is where you may select and add the items you wish to have as columns
in your report.

Select the annotation styles

In the blue box above, you may specify how you want to annotate the holes while you insert a
report. Based on the annotation styles you set up, you will have different end results in the
drawing, for example the image below.

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 As I have selected I would like to
annotate angle, pivot number, length
of hole. Once I print the report,
annotations will be automatically
added to along the drill holes. The
size of the annotation could be
adjusted as well in the settings.

Blasting Report Annotation: If the report type you are creating is a blasting configuration, please
unselect the ‘Insert hole annotations’ since when you insert a blasting report you should already
have your drilling report inserted somewhere in your drawing. Thus, to avoid the program
annotating the same holes twice, you should uncheck ’Insert hole annotations’.

Produce Drafting Sheets with Reports

Insert reports on your ring section
To produce your drafting sheet with reports, we first must insert the reports on your ring section.
To do this, simply click on Insert Report (DRIR):
• Select the report you wish to insert. Either drilling, blasting, …etc
• Designate the starting number of hole, pivot and prefix on the right side of the dialogue
box (Items will be greyed out if they are not selected when you set up the report format)

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 • Select holes with fence: You may select to have this option so after you click on OK,
you may us your cursor and draw a polyline intersecting with the drill holes, the order
that the polyline intersects with the holes will be the order of the hole sequence.
• Pick reference line
• Enter pivot number (optional, depending on your report settings)
• Place report in the drawing
• Annotate Section (optional)
Your finished product would look something similar to the following:

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Insert grid and produce drafting sheet layout
The next step you will have to do is insert a grid by calling the command Create Layout (GRD) in
Promine Essentials > Grid.
Once you click on the command, you will see this dialogue box:
This dialogue box allows you to select the title bloc available and customize scale, paper size,
grid, orientation, additional items such as north arrow.

Once you set up everything, you may click OK and insert the grid. You will be able to use your
cursor to indicate the position of your grid. A layout will be automatically created once you click
enter. As shown in the image below:

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As you can see when following this tutorial, it is quick and easy to produce the desired drill patterns
in Promine. The output of the reports together with an easily inserted printing grid guarantees that
accurate drilling sheets get into the mine to the drilling crews.

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