Slow moving? Well considering their shares out, and their former anemic price and the fact that they had to raise ALL private money, they haven't done that bad. They have had a couple of false starts. I would rate the Leitch bulk sample as a gamble that did not pay off. They talked about dilution, and the gaping hole the back hoe left in the ground said that was a given but I think they lost just as much in the mill. A 3 day run just does not given them time to balance the sample run. Ditto the last moly sample. 16 day run. Probably all they did was get an idea what was wrong with the milling circuit and the last few days to repair it. I would be amazed if the thing worked perfectly as it was a first time for everything. No real mining data so far that I have seen, and no gold recovery in that vein. There is gold in it, some assays to 28 grams. Structural analysis et al also lacking to date. So back to the well.
What Rox needs to do is get a 20,000 ton bulk sample of reasonable gold grade into the mill. 3 month run. get the mining, and the milling tuned up. at Least 30 per cent of that will go south too, but at least they will get things in line. It takes that long to train employees in not to much ore to waste and stay narrow on the effing vein structures.
If you think the start up problems are new to the industry, I would like to point out that 5 GB gold belt mines re ran their tailings because of recovery problems and one company, Lac, re ran them twice. When Leitch started up, they had 50% losses in their crusher circuit from missed fines. It took them 6 months to fix that. When Cullaton Lake started up they had less than 50% recovery for 8 months. Finally Campbell Chib came in and fixed that as they had more experience at CIP.
Rox has run their mill on some tests at 85% recovery on a 3000 ton sample back in 2001?. Annual report -- So it can be done. Frankly I would rebuild that carbon circuit or possibly change the whole thing over to flotation and intensive con treatment by a reactor system. That is a whole other learning experience.
They are going to have to get the mining and grade control thing figured out too. They need time, and experienced personnel for that. Not easy to come by. I did that for a while at area gold mines. Have to get inventive to stay on grade. It is easy to mine off. I know at Louanna we missed on 100 feet of lift. The bull qtz looked just like the vein for a while 100 feet times 150 feet times 4 that is 5,000 dry tons. And I mean dry, south of a tenth by a bit. Oops. Guess you can't mine that stuff by eye.. ahem.. Glad I did not frig that one up..
At least Rox has a crack at say 2 million tons that while not completely blocked out, can be said to be fair targets to infill and extend on previous drilling, stoping, and surface sampling. And they don't have to mine to China to get it. They have about 60% of the equipment to get the ore, and 40% of the workings to access.
They need a stock price of 50 cents, really or some partners to ramp up to mining. They may be able to ramp into some ore at the Empire and get it working. But can they develop out of that cash flow? Anything south of 50,000 successful tons does not make sense. And it could cost 3-5 million to get into it. 150 feet in vertical depth by ramp. We can't make it cost much more, as there are no more than 20,000 ounces in that.
10 million shares is all I would put out on that. It gets investors worried about leverage. The only way to look at it as growth. If they can ramp up production on 3 properties expending no more than 30 million, then we have the resultant stock price, that will justify substantial investment.
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