DTdr,

If you saw the hand of the assistant next to a vein (and a bat on the ceiling of the cave) then that would be the same video. The idea is to show some typical graphite veins in Sri Lanka. The hand-sized vein is probably one of the largest (~10cm) that they have in Sri Lanka.

Canada Carbon found some larger veins (~1m) on the wall of the Miller pit, but the grades of the veins there are not as good as the ones in Sri Lanka. The laws of nature seems to have some control the balance here: Small veins high grades, big veins lower grades...take your pick. Just like Au or Cu, lower grades but high tonnage would yield large resources (Barrick compared to GQC in Dominican Republic).

The underground operation remarks were not for this video. They came from a government report for Sri Lanka mines. There was also an article in the G & M some years ago showing pictures of an underground operation: Shirtless guy with a jack hammer chipping away at the small veins (and he had to follow the veins), and women sitting on the mine floor sorting "lumps" of graphite, by hand and put various sizes in bags, for other guys to carry out. The division seems to be clear cut: Guys doing heavy manual work, women just sorting. It's extremely labour intensive, compared to the potential pit-constrained operation (highly mechanized) for Albany. ZEN east and west pipes there have lower grades but the size of the pipes is much larger (see Zen 3-D model) resulting in a much larger resource estimate.

Hope that helps.

goldhunter