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Gold/Mining/Energy : Trump's 12 Diamond Picks, Discussions Limited -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: skelly who wrote (491)	1/30/1998 12:59:00 PM
From: Walt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2251

Greetings Skelly, Ill just elaborat on the core for a moment. There are two ways of splitting core. One is the old methode where the core is put into a splitter, a few inches at a time, it sits on a steel blade and a plunger is wapped with a hammer, the core theoretically splita in two and half falls out each side. One half put into the sample bag the other half bagged for sample. As you can imagine this method works but not all that well, what you are left with in the box is a whole bunch of pieces of broken core. Some rocks certainly split better then others. Kimberlite being a soft rock would tend to crumble. The other method is to cut the rock core with a diamond saw. This does a much better job. Kimberlite has an added problem, it weathers easily. I have seen nice fresh looking pices of kimberlite core end up in a year or two looking quite grey and weatheres. So often good samples are coated with a clear substance (shellac etc) to preserve them. Some companies will split the core but other do as george says they take representative samples to preserve and keep. Some companies as well as logging the core will photograph it. The main reason for keeping the core is so you will have a geological record of the hole. Logging core is a bit of an art form and depends alot on how good and observant the geologist is. If you had five geologists logging the same hole their logs could vary considerably. On some properties lets say it has been drilled four differnet programs and logged by four different geos. A new company takes over and they may go back and relog all the old holes to make them uniform etc. Also someone may come along with a new idea and see some significance in an alteration zone etc that the others missed. Assays cost alot so some company only split small amounts where others will split and assay the entire hole. With most rocks when you send a sample off to get assayed (for say gold or base metals) the material is ground up and only a small portion of the sample assayed (the remainder is called the pulps) most companies will also keep the pulps incase they want to reassay or test for something else. With kimberlites its a little different because they want to test as much material as possible and the nature of kimberlites is they come in phases. So they tend to keep representative samples. Maybe a meter of phase one, a meter of phase two etc. Or they keep every tenth meter etc. hope that helps a little regards Walt