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Gold/Mining/Energy : BANDORE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Just G who wrote (1461)	2/20/1999 11:16:00 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1692

For one thing, earth sciences is the wrong discipline. We are talking about rock, not earth. Perhaps his field of criticism is agronomy not rockology. TNM is right, nobody regulates the companies in what they can call news. It has been since the 17 century been known to be an impossible task. One can hold them to the news they print but it would be daunting indeed to filter it before the fact. How would you do it fairly? If someone found a vein 100 feet wide of evident chalcopyrite and a grab sample was 10% copper would he be justified in not announcing it? Can he then pick up shares if its not announceable? You have to look at both sides. The thorny dilemma leads companies to err on the side of volubility, which may suit the promoter at first glance, but in truth, it is not that effective. Certainly a high grade vein is interesting. Too many, even professionals, get the opinion that you can "find high grade anywhere". Would that were true. I once told someone that in order to pay prospectors I could easily offer them $10,000 for each vein they can find on unstaked ground that runs 1/10 of an ounce over its width or has the possibility of grabs over 0.50 ounces per ton. I doubt that many would be over paid. If I offered $100,000 to those who could find me grades over 5.0 ounces in grab samples, again, there are not many intrepid ore hounds who would get rich. The average sample grab or channel at any gold mine is in fact near zero. I have done 1000's at properties, and the only place you see consistency is in the established veins. During exploration you miss completely far more often than you hit. I once sampled an underground vein for one mile with some 800 channel samples. The highest grade was about 0.90 ounces per ton. And it was one in a hundred. Grabs fared no better to drive grades high in individual samples. Yet the average was 0.25 ounces per ton. Other veins can average the same with high channels and grabs and many low assays. It varies. The nuggetiest most variable areas can be extremely productive though as Timmins was and is. Drilling alone is an ineffective tool here. Only trial mining is truly decisive in determining grade in these conditions. And that is the in texts since 1934. So I have found this myth of "you find that everywhere" to be much overstated. In fact I always know the lowest assay on any property. It's zero. I want to know the highest possible. That tells you something. And you cannot depend on cutting the assays back to one ounce. The Salmita Mine used to get grades of 3 and 4 ounces once in a while and most often, low, low grades. To calculate the grade correctly that came from mining one had to arithmetically average the high with the many low. If one cut the high grade it would never have had the grade to mine on paper. But it was viable. EC<:-}