Donald: You are right about one thing, to do this scam you need to carefully prepare and mix the salting materials. You are dealing with such a small gold concentration that just a tiny pinch makes the sample too rich for words. I suspect they would make a first dilution down to a few thousand PPM, then you could put ounces of that into a 10 pound sample, mix it and end up with 1-10 grams per ton in the final mix. For example:A 10 Lb sample is 1/200th of a ton, and so 5 grams per ton becomes 5/200 grams, or 25 milligrams of gold, just over 1 cubic millimeter. Hard to weigh, mix evenly etc.
But if you take 1 grams of finely pulverized alluvial gold and add it to
20 pounds and mix it well you end up with 100 grams per ton, "salting concentrate". If you then take 1/10th of a pound of this( and add it to 20 pounds of sample you end up with 1 gram per ton and so forth, it simplifies the salting and as long as the mixtures of the concentrate are precise you can use a measuring cup to do it and no fiurther precision weighing is needed. At the density if crushed material one cup would weigh around 20-22 ounces and a rought and ready fast salting method ensues that is accurate within 5-10%(all you need, as the holes are supposed to vary). Couple this with a composite salting map and you are off to the races. This job is doable by one person, as once the master plan and concentrate is made up the rest will go quickly. Other employees can prep the samples by bagging and crushing, and one person could salt the lot. bit by bit as drilling proceeded. I would be able to salt at least 25 samples per hour from prepared concentrate and a drill hole map, varying the salting from 1 gram to 10 grams per ton as needed(or higher /lower). This represents around 150 feet of core, and so one hole would take a couple of hours to do max, as few had over 300 feet of pay zone. So I could do 4-6 holes per day or 30-40 in a week. Depending on the rate at which holes were drilled, I estimate DeGuzman would need around 1 week per month on site to keep the scam going. It would be interesting to chart the rate of drilling, rate of assays from the labs a,d the presence of DeGuzman on site to see if there were large gaps when DeGuzman was away for a month or so showed up as a slump in samples back from the assay lab. Of course he may have put in some delays to artificially confound such an analysis, but perhaps not??
Bill |
