Ladies and gentlemen: As an example why the metallurgy is so important and possilby a time consuming operation -->

When I was operating as the assayer and semi mill operator for the Sabina mine we were putting 3 + grams off Au in the Cyanide ponds, then sending 3 grms to the dump -- incidentally, I have my eye on that dump right now, it is a huge bonanza.

Normal tritating did not clearly reveal why we would start with 3 grams, extract it, then simply throw out 3 grams on the dump ??

Since we had a defunct Perkins Elmer AA from a previous operator, I disassembled it, cleaned it up, reassembled it and recalibrated it. this took a bit of time since there were no manuals, but I then was able to show that in the first 2 days we had 2 grms into the recoverable solution, but by the third day it had been removed and replaced by other base metals.

It would take mi buddy "HOOV" to find out why. I am not a good enough chemist to find out.

It was then fairly easy to plot the point of max recovery, which was almost 80%, then run the cyanide solution through an Merril Crowe system that I had built, and recover the gold.

All of this took time but paid off greatly in the recovered Gold. this is just a sample of what JIM may find in the fine tuning of the mill operaton, so relax.

Don Jose de La Mancha