Hard Rock Mining Equipment: Types, Uses, Costs, Safety

Hard rock mining equipment does five jobs: drill the rock, blast it, load the broken rock, haul it out and hold the ground up while people work. Open pits lean on big blasthole drills, shovels and trucks. Underground mines use compact drill jumbos, load-haul-dump machines (LHDs) and bolters sized to the tunnel. Price depends on size and power source, and the only dated, published unit prices we found are from a 2013 gold study: a two-boom drill jumbo was budgeted at C$1.17 million. This guide explains each machine, gives sized examples only where a source states them and sets out the MSHA and NIOSH safety points a buyer should check first.

It is written for mine owners, licence holders and the consultants who advise them. It does not cover placer (loose gravel) gold, which uses different plant such as sluices and dredges, and it does not rank brands. For the lithium side of hard rock, see our pages on where lithium is mined and Australian spodumene producers.

Terms used in this guide

• Hard rock: ore held in solid rock (a lode or vein) that has to be drilled and blasted, as opposed to loose gravel or sand. In the United States, USGS reports that gold came from more than 40 lode mines in 12 states in 2025 (estimate), plus placer mines mostly in Alaska.
• Bench: a horizontal step in an open pit. Blastholes are drilled down from the bench top.
• Burden and spacing: burden is the distance from a blasthole to the open face; spacing is the distance between holes in a row.
• Subdrill: extra hole depth below the planned floor so the rock breaks cleanly at the bottom.
• Jumbo: an underground drill carriage with one to three booms that drills the face of a tunnel.
• LHD: load-haul-dump machine, an articulated loader that scoops and carries ore underground.
• Payload: the weight a truck or loader is rated to carry in one load.

How to choose hard rock mining equipment: five checks

Most poor purchases come from buying the machine first and the mine plan second. Work through these checks in order.

1. Open pit or underground? The tunnel or shaft sets the largest machine you can use. One 2013 gold study capped its underground fleet at 3.5 cubic yard LHDs and 20 tonne trucks because of the shaft dimensions.
2. How many tonnes per day? Output decides how many trucks and loaders you need and how large they should be. Size the loader to the truck, and the truck to the haul road.
3. What hole size does the blast design call for? Hole diameter, bench height and burden are linked, so choose the drill after the blast pattern, not before. The calculator below turns a pattern into metres and cost.
4. Diesel or battery power? Battery machines cost more to buy (see the price chart); the 2013 study planned to test them on short hauls to reduce ventilation needs.
5. Buy, lease or hire a contractor? A small or short-life mine often hires a drilling contractor. The 2013 study above priced only company-owned equipment and excluded contractor fleets.

Hard rock mining equipment at a glance

The table lists each machine, its job and a size or price only where a source states one. Blank means we did not find a published figure we could verify.

Drilling equipment: from blastholes to core

Surface blasthole drills

A blasthole drill makes the holes that carry explosives. Rotary rigs crush rock with a rolling-cone bit, while down-the-hole rigs hammer the bit directly at the bottom of the hole. Which one suits you depends on rock hardness and hole size. Hole size has a direct cost effect: the US Bureau of Reclamation’s blast design chapter says large holes are cheaper to drill per unit volume and allow larger burdens and spacings, but give coarser fragmentation. The same chapter puts an average burden at 25 to 30 times the charge diameter for typical rock, with a smaller ratio for dense rock such as basalt. That manual is written for construction blasting, so treat its ranges as a starting point and use your own blast engineer’s design for a production pit.

Check these features when comparing rigs: a deck shroud and dust collector at the hole, an enclosed cab with filtered, pressurised air, automatic rod handling so nobody threads steel by hand, and a mast and stabilisers rated for your bench. The MSHA fatality alerts later in this guide explain why each of those matters.

Underground drill jumbos and longhole rigs

A jumbo drills the round of holes at a tunnel face before blasting. Its boom count and carrier size must fit the heading. The 2013 Phoenix gold study listed a two-boom jumbo at C$1,170,389 a unit and planned six over the mine life, with the tunnel planned at 3.7 m wide and 3.7 m high. Longhole rigs, which drill long production holes into stopes (the excavated ore blocks), were not listed in that fleet table.

Core drilling for exploration

Diamond core rigs are used before the mine exists, to take a solid cylinder of rock for assay and geology. Core comes in letter sizes. The University of Kentucky’s core glossary lists AQ at 1.0 in, BQ at 1.4 in, NQ at 1.87 in, HQ at 2.5 in and PQ at 3.35 in, and notes that larger core takes more power, so the diameter may have to shrink as the hole gets deeper. For method comparisons and contractor selection, see our guides to picking a drilling contractor and the stages of mineral exploration.

▶ A claymation walk through how gold is mined and refined, from drilling to the ring. · 5:27

Loading and hauling: shovels, LHDs and trucks

In an open pit, a shovel or large wheel loader fills haul trucks, and the truck’s payload sets the loader size. Komatsu’s own page lists its 930E-5 electric-drive truck at up to 304 tonnes payload and 2,700 horsepower. We found no independent source for a typical truck price, so get written quotes that state the body, tyres and options included.

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Battery premium on the same machine

Thousand Canadian dollars per unit, 2013 quotes

Underground, space is the limit. The 2013 Phoenix study planned 6.7 tonne LHDs and 20 tonne trucks on the main levels, noted that both sizes exist in battery-powered models and said battery machines still needed testing at the site. Its quotes were C$741,500 for a battery 6.7 tonne LHD against C$471,800 for the diesel version, and C$1,033,000 for a battery 20 tonne truck against C$554,200 for diesel.

Ground support, raise boring and other underground machines

Bolters install steel bolts that clamp fractured rock into a solid beam. Shotcrete units spray a concrete skin onto the rock. Scaling machines pull loose slabs from the roof. Together they make up the ground-support fleet, and they are the machines that most directly protect people from falls of ground.

Raise borers cut round shafts between levels, usually for ventilation or ore passes. A 2019 paper from the Australian Centre for Geomechanics reports that virtually all long ventilation shafts and orepasses in Sweden’s Boliden mines are excavated by raiseboring, with lengths of 25 to 650 m and diameters of 2.0 to 6.5 m, and that high rock stress at depth can make a bored shaft hard to keep open until it is reinforced.

What hard rock mining equipment costs: one dated fleet example

Public price lists for mining machines are rare. Manufacturers sell on quotation, and trade sites often repeat unsourced numbers. The most transparent figures we could verify come from technical reports filed by listed companies, where an engineering firm lists a quantity and a unit price for each machine. The example below is the Phoenix gold project preliminary economic assessment prepared by SRK Consulting for Rubicon Minerals in August 2013. The report says the estimates came largely from budgetary quotes from manufacturers and vendors, and that the table covers company-owned equipment only.

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Unit prices of underground machines, 2013

Thousand Canadian dollars per unit, selected machines

These are 2013 Canadian dollars with no inflation adjustment, for one underground gold mine sized by its shafts. Use them to compare machines against each other, not as today’s prices.

The price chart below compares unit prices. The battery-versus-diesel chart in the loading section shows the premium for the same machine.

Across the whole fleet, the study totalled C$42.3 million for 143 units over the mine life before a 2 percent freight allowance and a 20 percent contingency, which brought the total to C$51.6 million. The fleet chart groups that spending. LHDs are the largest share because the plan called for many of them and replaced them over time. Some sustaining costs in the study are lower than unit price times quantity where rebuilds were budgeted instead of new machines.

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Mobile fleet capital by group over the mine life

Million Canadian dollars, five of the fleet groups only (about C$5.0M of other equipment not shown), before freight and contingency, 2013

Safety rules and hazards a buyer should check

Drilling rules in MSHA Part 56

For surface metal and nonmetal mines in the United States, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) rules on drilling are in Subpart F of 30 CFR Part 56. They say, in brief, that equipment defects affecting safety must be fixed before use, the drilling area must be inspected for hazards first, crews must stay clear of augers and drill stems in motion, drills must be attended while operating, large drill holes must be covered or guarded and people must not hold drill steel while collaring holes. Underground metal mines have a parallel Part 57. Rules differ by country, so confirm local law if you operate outside the United States.

What MSHA fatality reports show about drills

• Entanglement: in November 2012 a contract driller at a shale quarry died when the rotating drill steel caught him while he tried to thread a new rod by hand. MSHA’s best practices include never threading steel while the head is rotating, and fitting automated rod changers or using two people.
• Edge falls: in 2004 a driller fell about 90 feet from a highwall while rethreading steel; MSHA’s investigation found he was not wearing a securely anchored harness and lanyard.
• Ground fall underground: in June 2010 a contract miner at a silver mine died while bolting a raise when he tried to scale loose rock by hand. MSHA’s report said controls were inadequate and the scaling bar provided did not let him scale from a safe place.

Silica dust at the drill

Drilling rock that contains quartz makes respirable crystalline silica, a dust that scars the lungs. Two controls dominate. A dust collector captures dust at the hole. An enclosed cab with filtered, pressurised air protects the operator. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sets out both for vehicle-mounted rock drills in a fact sheet for construction: the dust collector should move about three times the volume of the air used to flush cuttings, and a cab needs a well-sealed, positive-pressure design with an intake filter rated MERV-16 or better. That fact sheet is a construction standard, not a mining rule, but the engineering is the same. In a NIOSH study of an older surface drill at a silica sand operation, a modified cab filtration and pressurisation design reached an average cab efficiency of 93.4 percent.

MSHA finalised a lower silica limit in April 2024, but the electronic Code of Federal Regulations shows the amendment to section 56.5001 as delayed indefinitely by a Federal Register notice of 6 April 2026. An industrial hygiene firm’s summary says MSHA stayed enforcement while both silica rules await judicial review, and that the proposed 8-hour limit of 50 micrograms per cubic metre is expected to stay. Check MSHA’s current notices before you specify dust controls.

Haul roads and dumps

For surface mines, MSHA requires berms or guardrails on roadway banks where there is a drop-off that could overturn a vehicle, at least as high as mid-axle of the largest vehicle that uses the road (section 56.9300). Plan truck width and road width together, and remember that berm height is tied to your biggest truck, so a bigger truck can mean rebuilding every berm.

▶ The seven environmental impacts of mining, explained in clay. · 2:31

Drill-and-blast cost calculator

Use the calculator below to turn a blast pattern into holes, metres and cost. Put in your own pattern and your own contractor or in-house cost per metre. The hole count assumes every hole breaks one block of rock the size of burden times spacing times bench height.

Where satellite screening fits before you buy a drill

The cheapest hole is the one you do not drill in the wrong place. Farmonaut’s satellite-based mineral detection studies a licence area from space and ranks exploration targets to test, with results in 5 to 20 business days. The output is a target map, not a resource estimate, and drilling is still needed to confirm anything. To request a quote for your own area, use the mining query form.

▶ What Farmonaut Mining Pro does before any drill rig is mobilised. · 4:56

For a closer look at a related question, see our guide: Gold Mining Tools: 10 Types by Stage and Safety Rules.

Frequently asked questions

What is hard rock mining equipment?

It is the set of machines used to drill, blast, load, haul and support solid rock that holds ore: drills and jumbos, loaders and shovels, haul trucks, rock bolters and shotcrete units, plus raise borers for shafts. The group differs from placer equipment, which handles loose gravel.

What equipment is used in underground hard rock mining?

The main units are drill jumbos for tunnel faces, longhole drills for stopes, LHDs to load and carry rock, underground trucks, bolters, shotcrete units and scalers. A 2013 gold study listed 143 units of mobile equipment for one mine, from jumbos to personnel carriers.

What is the difference between a jumbo and a blasthole drill?

A jumbo is a tracked or wheeled underground carriage with booms that drills many small holes at a tunnel face. A blasthole drill is a surface rig that drills larger, deeper holes down a bench. Their hole sizes and uses differ, so one cannot replace the other.

How much does a drill jumbo cost?

A 2013 preliminary economic assessment budgeted a two-boom jumbo at C$1,170,389. That is a dated engineering estimate for one project, not a current price. Ask for written quotes that name the boom count, carrier, rock drills, controls and spares.

How big is the largest mining haul truck?

Komatsu lists up to 304 tonnes of payload for the 930E-5. Underground trucks are far smaller; a 2013 study capped its underground trucks at 20 tonnes because of the shaft size.

Are battery-electric mining machines more expensive?

In the 2013 study, yes: the battery 6.7 tonne LHD was quoted at C$741,500 against C$471,800 for diesel, and the battery 20 tonne truck at C$1,033,000 against C$554,200. The study planned battery machines for short hauls to reduce ventilation needs and said they needed on-site testing; diesel was still required for ramps and longer hauls.

What are the main hazards when drilling hard rock?

MSHA fatality reports describe entanglement in rotating drill steel, falls from highwall edges and falls of ground while scaling or bolting. Respirable silica dust from the drilled rock is the main long-term health hazard for drillers.

How do you control silica dust from rock drills?

Capture the dust at the hole with a shroud and dust collector, or isolate the operator in a sealed, pressurised cab with a high-grade filter, and use water on the bit where it suits the rig. OSHA describes both approaches and NIOSH has tested them; cab seals and filters must be kept in repair.

Which MSHA rules cover drilling?

Subpart F of 30 CFR Part 56 covers drilling at surface metal and nonmetal mines, and Part 57 covers underground metal and nonmetal mines. Other parts apply to haulage, ventilation and ground control. The regulator’s current text is the reference, not this summary.

Should a small mine buy or hire drilling equipment?

A short-life or low-tonnage operation often hires a contractor, which moves the purchase and maintenance cost into a per-metre rate. Buying makes sense when the drilling is continuous for years. Compare a contractor’s rate with the calculator’s cost per metre on your own pattern.

Does satellite data replace drilling?

No. Satellite screening ranks areas worth testing from the surface; drilling is how you measure what is in the rock. Used before drilling, it can help decide where the first holes go.