Mr. Wendell, thank you for your most informative posts. You made a recent comment about the Franklin Lake ore and the Johnson Lett technology. I it appears that you are not the only one being skeptical about the viability of grinding large amounts of ore down to 1,000 mesh. The finest mesh size mentioned in any reference book I was able to find is 325. As I understand it, mesh size is defined as the amount of openings per inch in a screen. Well, it is really hard to imagine a screen with 1000 openings per linear inch; let alone one through which you can pass tons of ore per day.
Unfortunately, Naxos has not done a very good job answering previous questions on this matter. My speculation is that in the JL process, the ore might be ground in one pass only, but not screened. In this case nobody would know for sure if we are dealing with 100 mesh or 1,000 mesh.
Another thought is that clay by definition is composed of particles smaller than 2 microns (is that roughly 1,000 mesh?). So by processing only the (presumably) gold bearing clay fraction of the ore, the comminution might not be a full fledged grinding process, but rather the breaking apart clusters of loosely agglomerated particles, akin to crushing a sugar cube.
It would be interesting to read your opinion on this and on the JL process in general.
Kurt Reschner |
