To: Che who wrote (5891 ) 10/6/1998 6:41:00 PM From: Richard Mazzarella Read Replies (4) | Respond to
Che, I also got the OK to publicly explain what went wrong with the 500lb recovery test. There were a series of things that went wrong, Mr. Murphy at his best. Some of it could even be view as embarrassing. The first was the COC reported in press release 05/15/98. There was a screw up with the instrumentation, all the values were bogus. So much for COC (Didn't Naxos just have one of those COC's? <VBG>)). The rush to report the result at the AGM is the embarrassing part. Anybody that followed this company for any time knew there was something wrong with that report, nil for fire assay when there have been 1000s of assays. The next problem was the ore taken for the bulk assay. It was one of the worst areas of metal concentration on the whole property, you couldn't find a worst ore area. Only after the paleo-channel mapping was this understood. Magnetic only mapping is very shallow, you also need to add the mobile ion mapping for an accurate picture of metal distribution (see the technical section on Maxam's webpage). These paleo-channels are analogous to veins in hard rock. Precious metals in the veins, nothing in the rock matrix. Same thing goes for the paleo-channels. You can go from high metal concentrations to nothing in just a few feet off the channel. (I speculate that was some of the problem in IPM not being able to show good assays.). Next comes the reason why Maxam can't do anymore large bulk testing at the location they had the poor result. The consultant that was doing the testing wasn't going to get the required air quality permit. They weren't about to get a permit just for Maxam's work. They would have to qualify their whole operation while Maxam was only a small part of their activities. No more bulk testing will be done on Maxam ore there. I must admit to not completely understanding all the issues here, there may be other problems with that consultant, but I think it may simply have to do with keeping the government away. So there we have it, everything that could go wrong did. Nature sure has a tight grip on its desert dirt metals. However I am certain that in time nature must give up its grip to the hard work and technology being applied. Runyon has said that the southwest will eventually become the precious metal capital of the world. I hope he can deliver on that conjecture.
