Wall control blasting practices arc necessary to reduce the impact of blasting on mine faces but can also have a significant negative impact on mine productivity and operating costs. The conventional practice in deep open pit mines is to use so-called trim blasts adjacent to pit walls. To provide burden relief these trim blasts have fewer rows than full production blasts and are fired to a cleared free-face: hence they are termed ‘unchoked.’ This practice leads to scheduling constraints on the pit operations and can cause ore dilution due to excessive muckpile movement. The use of such trim blasts stems from the perception that increased wall damage results from ‘choked’ blasts. These concerns are based on the unproven assumptions that blast vibration levels and explosive gas penetration increase with increased blast burden and face confinement. This paper describes work undertaken as part of a major investigation into wall control blasting at the KCGM Fimiston Mine, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. It deta...