Hello Folks
January 19, 1998
There is a lot of discussion of precious metals clusters or not to be precious metals clusters. Well, the base of the discussion is what kind if bill of goods are the DD companies trying to sell us? It is clear that some of you writing to me by email and possibly posting in this thread are ready for this. Why do the conventional labs usually discredit DD researchers. The answer is sometimes ignorance on both sides of the argument. First of all I must question ingredients that are used. If they are purchased for analytical quality they have specifications of purity listed with them. But those purity specifications are often by standard methods of analysis. In the assay, if you use a standard method of analysis, the materials used were blank to start with, they continue to produce blanks. But if you use that same material by special flux correction procedures, yes even the mints and texts of old support this procedure, gold will frequently come out of the ingredients used and the assayer will appear to have impure reagents. One text I have says that a controlled parting procedure by the US Mint, as I recollect, found that the parting acid can load with up to 600 mg per liter in the parting acid. I think the number with cluster ores can be much higher than that. If correct, the parting acid gold losses would not allow one mine in Nevada to assay any gold values if that were always the case.
Back to the purity question, the assayer brings the purity question upon himself. Murray White has perfected the method of slag correction assays to new levels. The knowledgeable assayers of old that do not practice Bozonian Theory are impressed with the work that Mr. White can perform. What he does is assays the ore, then he re-assays the flux several times while turning the slag from miscible glass to colloidal and split non-miscible phases. He assays blanks right along side of the ore at the same time and under the same conditions. He takes the values reported in the blanks and deducts those values from those reported in the ore samples.
Murray demonstrated his methods at Ledoux for due diligence work on COC samples. The gold produced was corrected for the blank values. All results were checked by instrumentation which verified the results. The blanks averaged about .003 opt gold as I recall. The ore samples were as reported by one of the DD companies. It is that .003 opt gold that was reported in the blanks and deducted from the assays that is where the misconception got to Mr. Baines. Now you know how Mr. Baines gets his dirts wrong. I have seen assays done like this report 5 and 10 opt gold, more commonly .15 opt and lower, but the fact remains that those numbers are a long way from .003 opt gold. I have seen other methods that work well also get gold from the blanks. Blanks have to be run to deduct those values as corrections from the initial assay. It is the rule. My hat is off to Ledoux, a lab with a hundred years of tradition in settling assay disputes. They also repeated the work themselves. They had nothing to prove but what is right is right. They look at DD work as nuisance work, but it is a job they still have to do to be the real umpire lab. And they do that job when called upon.
Assayers of old did this slag correction practice much of the time. Some were better than others. Some learned about the non-miscible processes following the first fusion, which places the total contents of the sample, in a semi-dissolved state; others just did repeat assays without changes to fluxes. The later didn't have the clue. Assayers using the methods so popular today can not assay the difficult ores and it is for sure that they can not assay the control assay either. They try to do the impossible in an excess litharge environment and in a one step crucible fusion. It can be done sometimes in a one step fusion, but with DD ores it requires a flux that is not of the excess litharge type. I once wrote a paper in which I referred to Litharge as the real thief. That was a long time ago. It can work for or against the assayer. I am placing this post in due regard that some readers are not quite so up to science as others, but I tried to make it so everyone can understand it. The DDs have to learn that if they published a little more, there would be fewer skepticisms in their work. A lot of people are able to understand the facts. That is the way to quiet the likes of reporters that rely on industry spokesmen for their facts when their facts are wrongly reported. Now you have the facts. You can think for your selves. mike |
