Carlson 30th Anniversary User Conference
April 7 – 10, 2013
IMPROVE YOUR SKILLS ● LOOK TO THE FUTURE ● CELEBRATE THE PAST
Carlson Mining – Drillhole Importing, Editing & Reporting
April 8, 2013 – Session 2
Presented By: Brian Hamm
BHamm@CarlsonSW.com
This tutorial covers the importing, editing, reporting and graphical representation of drillholes. It
will go through the various importing functions and formats, checking and validating the data
with queries and reports, and using various utilities to fix any problems encountered.
Define Drillholes
Define Drillhole is a prerequisite to creating, importing and processing drillholes. This is a
configuration file containing settings for manual drillhole entry, data storage, predefined
attributes and the default key density. There is no geologic data stored in this *.CH file.
Determine what “Method to locate strata” and “Enter values in” options you are using in your
drillhole database. “Use External Database” option will be covered later in this course. For the
purpose of importing drillholes, attributes do not need to be defined first.
Import Drillholes
There are many different formats of drillhole files that may be imported. The drillhole data can
be found in one file, two files (survey and lithology), three files (survey, lithology and quality), or
four files (survey, lithology, bed name and quality). The most common method to use is the
“Custom” option. This will match most any format of drillhole file and import it into Carlson.
The first prompt asks whether the data is stored in one or two files.
It will either import drillholes from one file, or from two files, where one file is the Survey/Collar
file and the second file contains the strata/lithology and quality attributes if available. If all the
drillhole data is stored in one file, the correct choice is “No”.
Importing from One File
Selecting No for separate files will bring up the window to select the file where the entire
drillhole information is stored in one file.
After choosing the text file containing drillholes, the preview appears in the bottom of the
window. Simply match the “Used” section of the window to the order of the preview shown
below. After choosing “OK”, the total number of drillholes imported is displayed along with any
error messages at the command line, if certain holes were not able to be imported. Error
messages can include missing easting, or missing strata name, etc.
Importing from Two Files
When selecting “Yes” for the Separate file format, here is an example format of two files used.
The first file is for survey/collar information and the second file is for structure/lithology.
If all is set correctly, there should be drillholes on screen, layered and colored by their type and
in the correct locations. Zoom Extents is a good check to make sure there aren’t any extreme X
or Y locations.
Import Qualities
If the quality attributes are contained in a separate file, or are obtained from a lab at a later date,
this option will import the quality file into the existing drillholes on screen. One example file is
shown here in Excel.
This is very similar to Import Drillhole, where the file format is defined in the “Used” section.
Selecting OK will bring in the quality data and report how many quality values were imported
into the drillholes.
Use External SQLite Database
In the Define Drillhole command, there is the setting that controls where the geological data is
stored once it is brought into CAD. It is either stored in the drawing, in what is called the
Dictionary. In this black box, it is not editable or even viewable, other than with the commands
found in the Drillhole menu. The other option for storing the data is a live link out to an SQLite
database. (Access database is still an option, but only used for x32bit PCs, or with an IntelliCAD
installation as x32. It is not fully x64bit compatible.
Taken from www.SQLite.org : “SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained,
serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. SQLite is the most widely
deployed SQL database engine in the world. The source code for SQLite is in the public
domain.”
Here is a screen shot of the SQLite homepage, showing some of its sponsors. Mozilla has a
nice, free database editor found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlitemanager/ and there are other good ones available from various resources such as
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/ as another example.
In the Define Drillhole window, the option for the Database is now going to be set to Use
External Database and the type will be SQLITE. Choosing the Select button will create the new
file with a CDB extension (Carlson DataBase). Once this is set, the next step is to import the
holes from the CSV as normal.
Here is the Mozilla SQLite editor showing these drillholes in it.
Edit Drillhole
After the drillholes are in the drawing, this command allows for dialog box viewing and editing.
There are three ways to activate this command. When picking the command from the menu,
drillholes can either be selected by picking the symbol on screen, or by typing N or Name and
then entering the name. Any changes made here can be saved to update the drillholes. Quality
attributes appear after highlighting any seam with quality and choosing Edit.
When using the SQ
shown here.
Lite database, the Edit Drillhole window displays the source of the data
Drillhole Datasheet
This is another method of viewing and editing the drillholes. It is a spreadsheet type viewer. It is
somewhat easy to delete a row or drillhole by accident, so extreme care must be used here if
any editing and deleting is to be done. This might be better used as just a viewer, and do most
of the editing from within Edit Drillhole. Upon exiting the datasheet, any changes made here are
prompted to be saved.
Draw Drillhole Text Formatter
A next logical step is to label the drillholes, also known as positng the drillhole names. Any item
in the drillhole can be labeled beside the drillhole symbol. At a minimum, usually the drillhole
name is displayed. But there are options here to post any data value that is contained in the
drillhole. There are options for text placement, offset, layer, and size. These drillhole names are
to the right of the symbol in row one.
Define Strata – Read Drillholes
The strata list can be defined at any time, but sometimes it is more efficient to import the
drillholes first, then use the Read Drillholes button to search the drillholes and add all strata and
bed names found to the list. This can be used as a check to verify there were no typos in the
names. Once the strata and bed names are on the list, each one should be edited for color,
layer, density, etc. Individual edits can be made in the spreadsheet High-lighting a single line
and selecting Edit brings up the entire Strata Definition window.
Draw Geologic Columns
This command has many options for drawing the geologic columns. Drillholes may be lined up,
projected along a polyline, drawn singly next to each symbol, drawn on a Fence Diagram, or
drawn in 3D. Options are available for labeling, hatching, scale and more. Any desired hatching,
colors and layers should be predefined with Define Strata. Here are the settings used to draw
the On 2D Grid lined up with the strata connections drawn.
Drillholes Lined Up
Drillholes in 3D
Invalid Strata Report
Before starting any of the gridding and modeling processes, this report should be run. This
command checks for any out of order strata that don’t correlate properly from one drillhole to
another. The command will create grids even though they are not correlated properly. There is
a warning message displayed at that time, but sometimes it goes unnoticed. Running this first
will ensure that all problems are fixed. Keep running this report after fixing the problems until an
empty report screen appears. Arrows are drawn to the problem drillholes at the time the report
is closed for a visual location of the conflicting drillholes. This doesn’t need the Geologic Order
file defined, but if there is one, it will use it for the ordering. All of these problems need to be
corrected before making the models.
Strata Order and Count
Another good check before the modeling processes is to see how the program interprets the
strata order and how many drillholes each strata is found in. This way, if there is a misspelled
strata name it will show up here. Also, if there is a Key bed name that is set to Non-key, it will
also show up here as a bed name _TOP instead of _KEY. If there is a problem with the order,
then the Define Geologic order should be set for confirmation. This is only needed if the
program has a problem sorting the strata. This happens with partial drillholes where all the
strata are not found in one continuous drillhole.
Mark Compliance Drillholes
This is an optional step used to find drillholes that contain certain parameters. These
parameters can be any attribute such as BTU, thickness, elevation or even just check if the
strata exist in the drillholes, and mark the holes where it is found. The marking of the drillholes
can be changing the layer, setting the type, or just drawing a circle around the drillhole. It can be
used in combination with the previous command, Strata Order and Count. If there is a mistake
there, such as a misspelled strata name, or one is NonKey instead of Key, then this will circle
the holes so they are easy to find and correct. There were only 2 holes containing C6_KEY, and
this command will circle them in the drawing to find their locations.
This command puts a yellow circle around the holes that comply, as seen below.