A little Info On Orex's Goldboro PropertyThis info was posted by a ueser called merv who has been on stockhousae since October 28, 1997. It was posted March 8, 2000, read it!
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merv (ID#: 6703) A little info on Goldboro 4/8/00 05:13 1298970
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I spent seven years working on the Goldboro project for Orex, Minnova, and Placer Dome. To say the least the geology and metallurgical aspects of the deposit are interesting. The ore body has been traced from the East end of the property near the old East Goldbrook Mine to the Isaac's Harbour River some 2 miles to the West. The structure is somewhat like taking a phone book and folding then leaning it at an angle to the East on it's long axis, this is what the ore body actually looks like. The host is composed of turbadite sediments, namely arenitic sandstone, greywake, and argillicious shales. These sediment layers have been folded and altered through various phases of geologic activity and intruded by massive amounts of quartz ( some of the veins are up to 40 feet wide. The sulfide mineralization is mainly arsenopyrite with minor amounts of chalcopyrite, galena, sphalerite, and pyrite.
The gold occures in free form in grains that range in size from a nugget reported in the old Boston-Richardson mine that weighed 7 ounces to ones that have been noted in testing as small as 4 microns. Gold also occures mixed in the arsenopyrite matrix. There are subbordinate structures within the ore body which control zones of enrichment which can be noted by a change in the character of the ore zones and a noticable increase in grade.
Orex, and the others who have worked on this deposit have noted the metallurgical complexity of this property. The biggest problem has been a method to get accurate assay numbers to estimate grade. If you take a standard 1 kg assay sample, send it to the lab, and ask for 10 tests to be run on it using standard fire assay methods you will get 10 different numbers that flucutate greatly. The one method that was found to give accurate numbers was to take a large sample and run it through a pilot mill using a standard gravity/cyanide circuit. This was done in 1990 on two samples of roughly five tonnes each. When assayed using standard methods of some 300 fire assays each the resuls ranged from almost nothing to 3 grams. However when the samples were run through the milling circuit they returned a result of around 5.5 grams. This shows that standard assay methods are not accurate enough to grade this property. It is interesting to note that this same problem was noted back in 1908 when the mine manager stated the only accute way to estimate the ore grade was to take a large sample and mill it.
This proprty is probably one of the best in Nova Scotia and holds a huge potential for expanding it's resource as only 1/3 of it has been explored through modern methods and the deepest drill hole bottoms out at 800 meters, just scratching the surface by the standards of most mines today.
Jacques Levesque is a straight shooter who has been working on this project for a long time. Though not a mining man he understands the financle markets better than most and is backed by some very experienced people.
If you are interested in another opinion on this property speak with Paul Smith at the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources in Halifax. He has done a lot of work on the property and is considered "the expert" on Nova Scotia Gold.
Merv