As horse gins were generally wooden structures fabricated on the mine they
are unlikely to be built to a standard design or dimentions. Many late 19th
and some early 20th century mining manuals contain very useful material on
horse gins such as haulage rates per shift, per number of horses, etc. If
you look at any collection of illustrations or photographs you will see that
they are all a little different.
There is no fundamental difference between a gin used for mining and any
other purpose as the gin simply supplies rotary motion. It is how that
motion is applied to a task that differs. The main difference between gins
on coal mines and metal mines is the amount of material they need to raise
in a day. Therefore on coal mines gins often used more than one horse
(sometimes up to 12). This extra "horse power" was needed either to raise
loads from deeper shafts, or to raise larger tonnages per day, or indeed a
combination of the two. There can be exceptions and small scale, low output
mines sometines used cattle to drive the gin. On metal mines the usual
pattern was to use a single horse on shafts up to about 300ft depth, but
this is not a hard and fast rule.
Martin Roe
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