A man with a gravel pit it is said is usually the first man in town whom you can borrow money off (of). Next is the man with local pornognoraphic/bait shop, and the local bootlegger, not necessarily in that order. In some towns it was the man with the used car lot. (Sundridge Ontario) In Kirkland Lake it would have been the man with the gold mine, but I don't think you could have gotten nickel out of Harry Oakes with a fifty ton press. Sorry Harry, you were a cheap b-----d. Harry borrowed his money off the tailor, and man who ran the local Chinese Restaurant before he started his mine.
I had an ore dump worth about 35 dollars a ton I tried to get funding for for about 4 years. Nobody bit. It was "too risky". Costs were 11 dollars a ton, profit was 24, tons were 400,000. Capex 600K, no permitting. Obviously a bad bet. Too much gold. A while back a guy put a rock crusher on it, and chewed up much of the gold without bothering to recover it, paying 7 dollars a ton for the rock as road fill and made good money on that equation. I tried to tell the investors that we could sell our waste as road fill and make back the entire investment "for free" and they thought I was blowing smoke straight up their BVD's.
Yes, gravel pits one should keep one's eye out for, so to speak. I used to work at one from which was hauled on on a good day, about one truck every five minutes for 12 hours. That is 60K per day retail, so I could see a body making the odd sou from royalties. Even the Ontario gov made 181 dollars a day on that puppy.
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