Kelvin Brown from Reflex Instruments does not consider himself to be a hero, rather just one person playing his part in the team that rescued 33 trapped miners in Chile last week.

Brown, who is based in Perth, was just one of three "gringos", or non-Chileans, to take part in the operation.

He was initially contacted shortly after the cave-in when the rescue crew was making calls for specialist equipment needed to help find any survivors.

While Brown said he could provide the directional motors needed for the job, he soon received another phone call.

This time the rescue crew requested him on location in San Jose.

"Several days later they phoned back and said the Chilean president had actually contacted our manager in Chile direct and asked for him to go ahead and please do everything to speed it up," Brown said.

"That's when they called me in the middle of the night and, I think in 24 hours, me and my equipment were heading over in a plane to Chile."

Brown's task was to use his specialist knowledge with the directional motors and manage the drill team to make contact with any survivors.

When he arrived at the site, close to a dozen bore holes had already been drilled but none had penetrated the area where the survivors were thought to be trapped.

He said the inconsistency of the ground made drilling conditions hard but he used digital surveying equipment to help interpret and predict drilling patterns.

"It was all quite solid and competent ground but it was layered with soft sections and to a driller that means it's going to deviate and it's very hard to keep control of the direction.

"If the ground was all the same and didn't change its type, it's much easier to predict and calculate where I'll wind up 700 metres away.

"But when it goes hard soft hard soft, which it did, it made it quite difficult."

Brown said he tried to treat the operation like any other job but the reality and responsibility of his role only became clear when he drilled into a caved-in section of the mine.

"I thought, ‘what's going to happen here?'. At what stage do we say to the people, ‘we keep hitting cave-in' or ‘we were able to drill into an area where we saw a dead person'

"That's a terrible thing to have to say to people but that was the cold hard reality.

"When that happened, I really stopped enjoying myself, not that I was fully enjoying myself anyway but it started to become a little bit depressing at that stage."

Sixteen days after the cave-in and a number of failed bore holes later, Brown and the drill crew made contact with all 33 missing miners.

Brown said it was a huge surprise which he wasn't expecting.

"It's certainly quite a challenging and a difficult task to hit a shape that's only 5 metres by 5 metres and it's 700 metres away - to drill with what's behaving like spaghetti.

"Once the first rig went through, that was almost it for me.

"Two days later the second drill hole intersected, by this stage that was it - my role had finished.

"We had intersected two holes and there was a third one that was on target to go through, and after I left that also broke through."

These bore holes provided the trapped miners with access to food, water, communication with the outside world and hope of being rescued.

It was then another 60 days before all 33 miners were rescued safely from the small cavity 688m underground.

Although Brown coordinated the drill team that made the initial contact with the trapped miners he talked down his role in the operation.

"It wasn't any real rocket science, it was just stuff that we do every day here in Australia," he said.

"At the end of the day I just helped them make some better decisions and guided them and gave them some hot tips, if you will, on how to quickly achieve what they were doing.

"They were always going to get there but it just might have taken them a bit longer."