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Politics : Koan and Ralph Emerson's Far Right and Far Left Whacked Out -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: russet who wrote (13)	2/28/2007 12:40:26 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 103

That is hard to say. Some of the holes sound wider and lower grade than the resources indicated in your post. That would indicate they are expanding the OP potential of the resource. The geometry and spacing of holes is very important. They should indicate whether they are drilling to redefine or increase the body(ies). If they don't you have to wait for a resource estimate or guess. I find it hard to believe they would do all the new drilling merely at re-establishing the olde numberse. Timmins Nickel was a successful but short lived underground bulk mining operation that went ahead shipping a high nickel, low copper concentrate from a 600 tpd mill in the Timmins east area. They shipped a very long distance to Manitoba and the platinum content was not paid by the smelter (Sherrit) in order to pay the shipping. The nickel values were not penalized as the nickel was fairly pure in this type of con. The metal itself was said to be used to mint the new loonie or dollar coin. that may be an apocryphal story but it sounds good. The head grade was 2.0% nickel allowing 40 lbs per short ton at price high of 5 bucks a lb. Despite the 200 dollar theoretical price/ton, the CDN dollar advantage of nearly 16.6% and 80% recovery (0.2% tail alleged but 0.4% Ni actual) ($160 US/short ton net) they barely eked out an operating profit ending up at $123.80 Us per ton net @ $3.87 US Ni/lb. This was exacerbated by a tendency for management to milk the cash flow into a shareout scheme. There was rarely any money for paying bills, and their credit was constantly bad towards the end. It it thought that they were captive of a fairly high priced mining contracting group, and that milked a fair amount of money. One of the problems with the mill was that the host rock (serpentine dunite flow) ground out rather fine and cause flotation recovery problems. The then-mill-super Daryl Duke, a Queen's engineer, was seeking a solution for improved recovery that included column air flotation. I suggested using rod mills on the primary to reduce fines, and sliming. They demurred, as it it sounded so radical, but may actually have worked to reduced the fines. On the whole anywhere, north of ten dollars US/lb for Nickel, with improved recovery and good cost control, given access to a mill, it would be well worth mining 200,000 tons of that ore. Shipping to Xstrata should be an in demand kind of thing. They should not get hosed that bad. The key to all the Timmins "nickel groups" is that the monster smelter concentrator complex at nearby Kidd Creek ( now Xstrata) is putting in a Ni-Cu circuit and that will benefit all the putative Ni mines in the area, allowing minimal tonnage and infrastructure. This situation maximally benefits another new IPO coming out of Toronto, which is intending to put the old Texmont into production -- about a 15 million dollar enterprise. The Texmont has variously between 200,000 and 5 million tons of quite wide bulk ore at about 0.90% grade, underground. (depending on who you believe in resource estimation) LBE, Inspiration and the Texmont restarters should do well in the short term, say 3 years out. Regrettably I am going to have to say they all could be buys today. Prices will not be exactly favourable however timing wise. Getting out a profit depends on continued markets in jrs. etc.. summer time may not be that kind to springtime buyers. As usual, all depends on the coming fall, and the economy, market etc.. EC<:-}