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Strategies & Market Trends : Winter in the Great White North -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: russet who wrote (3060)	9/20/2002 2:48:30 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8273

Oh, hell the list is free. There is the one (diamond lab) I haven't built yet, and all the other ones, in that order of trustworthiness for competence and honourability. People tell me that Sk. Dev. council can handle samples, and the GSC can do electron probing. B. McClagnahan is with some lab somewhere doing probing. She used to be with the GSC. Now I tried to get the GSC to do some samples for me a few years back, but they had been "bought out" to do samples for the western discoveries in sk. and refused to probe any samples for us in Ontario. There is the other issue about whether the labs are competent to to proton probing or not. (Guelph University says it can do that.) The GSC, of course has had its budget savaged by the anti-mining liberals so it can't afford to take out the garbage on mondays. The Ontario GS is similarly constrained by budget, politics and attitude. This leaves the USGS which would co-operate if they had the budget and the equipment as they do not have an attitude problem whereas they are similarly politically hamstrung by liberal suits. Dupuis of Indigo fame had a lab in Vancouver, but I heard he sold it. Of course his interpretation of the results and yours could differ, depending on where you got the work repeated. Lakefield of course is Falconbridge owned. The other assay labs in Canada have varying amounts of diamond competence and equipment for caustic fusion. According to them they can handle small samples quite well. My opinion is that I would have to go and talk to them, and look at their equipment. Barringer is a possibility. There is quite a lot of consolidation that has happened in Ontario laboratories, and I am not sure this has increased their general abilities. X-Ray should be able to handle some of the work, but there are caveats from some parties about their predisposition towards reporting accurately. So then there is Loring, who do gold fairly well, Bell White, a small gold lab in Ontario, and Thunder Bay testing, who used to AA gold and told me they were the soul of discretion. This latter may be true. Swastike used to be good for gold, but got bought out and I don't know what they are up to now. Some universities tell me they are capable of doing work, and they have some equipment but both Toronto and Lakehead are cagey as hell about costs and degree of application to the problem. Generally schools are a poor place to go without a fat wallet. As a member of the public, let alone as an alumni, I have been coldly refused access to any sort of reasonably costed or gratis lab work at Haileybury, Lakehead and Toronto, for the past 28 years, without having to pay costs for determinations that approached astronomical heights. Montan University in Austria can do the work and possible Cambridge for a reasonable fee. Others to try are Heidleberg, and Moscow State U. In Moscow ask for Galina Kaderjavtseva. Send cash in advance for the work to Moscow, as Canadian promoters who have used them in the past did not pay. (Spider Res... Surprise!). Other people to try for diamond sampling are Bram Janse, and Victor Tcigonov. I can do caustic fusion and some mike work too, but no lab equipment. The OGS used to help prospectors and the Ontario government ran two labs. Temiskaming Testing and 77 Grenville st. in Toronto. Prospectors could get some samples done for free. The labs were not terribly good. I tried their results against my own at a mine lab when we did testing and I found them rather loose. Others I know complained about competence and repeatability. The government has shut them down. To my knowledge the general attitude of the average government employee who does work for the OGS is that the public can go to hell. This was not always the case but has evolved over the past 20 years as successive Ontario and Federal government departments have harrassed the mining industry and mines department employees. I guess you pays your money an takes your chances. There is CRA lab in Australia. Also Kennecott will do bulk samples for things like first rights of refusal. It's a tough call all around. Asking to find a lab to be nominated for sainthood finds a lot of devil's advocates. EC<:-}