While those drawings I featured yesterday – brilliantly done by High School student Ian Tomashik – show a great deal of insight into what several area mines may have looked like while in their full operational glory they only scratch the surface of the type of work Ian is capable of. Besides the more artistic renderings we have seen previously, Ian has also a few more academic drawings in his portfolio. These type of drawings are more important to people like myself, who are interested in the internal workings and layout of a mine’s surface buildings. For example…

Here’s a pair of elevation views of the Iroquois shaft and rock house. Ian drew these after seeing Paul Meier’s photos of the same shaft (taken when it was still standing) that I featured last year.

And then there’s this great cut-away drawing of Hancock No.2 shaft…

This amazing section view was drawn using a variety of sources, none of which included any blueprints of the building itself. Ian utilized the Quincy No.2 HAER drawings along with information provided from the Copper Handbook and various other photos of the shaft to make an educated guess as to the building’s interior layout. While perhaps not 100% historically accurate, it’s accurate enough to give a good idea of how these combination shaft / rockhouses worked.

Here’s a shot of the building in question while it was still standing, thanks to the Tech Archives:

According to Ian, the drawing seen above is part of a paper he’s writing about the Hancock Mine. Hopefully when its done he’ll let me publish it here on CCE.

While that’s all fine and great, both of these amazing pieces of work pale in comparison to what he sent me next…..

Yea. That’s what I said too. If my illustrative skills weren’t already feeling a bit neutered, this beauty made it official. This is a cut-away drawing of the Robbins / West Vein surface plant. I was so blown away by this one that I had to ask Ian how exactly it was done. This was his response:

For the Robbins Hoist diagram, for example, I used a few photos of the abandoned hoist house on Michigan Tech’s Keweenaw Digital Archives website, and those gave me the basic layout and features of the building’s insides… but I did further research on water tube boilers of the Babcock & Wilcox Compary, the makers of those found at the Robbins, finding blueprints of those, as well as typical small hoists and Ingersoll-Seargeant air compressors (the type installed there). Thus, the building is based off of photos and blueprints, but not all together… a little guestimation and a little common sense brought the whole picture together.

All I can say to that is… amazing!