goldhunter11 wrote: SilverW,
It's good that you had a chat with Redcloud and provided some additional info. Thx.
One passage is particularly interesting: "Furthermore, those 80 nuggets were hand-picked from the belt using a detector calibrated to detect the "larger" nuggets only (that mounted detector was
dialed down (underlined mine) due to sensitivity challenges i.e. the detector readings were constantly stopping the belt as it detected gold, gold, gold...)..."
Note: Figure 1 of the NR shows the conveyor belt and the detector (round disc) and a bunch of rocks (and nuggets) in a dry sorting.
Just to be sure that I have a correct understanding of the situation, "dialed down" = to make it less sensitive so that it could only detect larger nuggets, so that the conveyor belt did not stop too often? In other words, small nuggets, smaller than the smallest nugget on the board shown in Figures 2 and 3 in the NR would escape the hand picking and go the collection bin at the end of the belt. Those smaller nuggets will be recovered, along with the fine gold, later.
If this is true, then the final gold grade for sample KX157 would be expected to be signicantly greater than 15-40gpt? (+~14% for fine gold alone).
Perhaps, that is why Novo/Leo did not want to give out the weight of the 80 nuggets, or the average grade of the sample, (he told one poster that the company is not "allowed" to give out this info...presumably, because the results are not finalized?).
GH
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Silverwhere wrote: All – Much like the talented guesstimators here & elsewhere on other forums, RedCloudKS is approximating the grade (and sorry conspiracy/naysayer folks, no insider funny business going on), hence the low to high range of 15 to 40 g/t by RCKS.
I asked RCKS: “When you guys did your size/weight calcs on the 80 nuggets, did you subtract the non-gold rock material present in the nugget photos to determine gold-only shapes & weights?”
RCKS answer: “We tried to account for it in our estimation, which is part of the reason for the wide range.”
My follow-up response: “That makes sense as your calcs are an approximation. What's most interesting (and intriguing) is that, as you stated, the fines are not included - yet.
Furthermore, those 80 nuggets were hand-picked from the belt using a detector calibrated to detect the "larger" nuggets only (that mounted detector was dialed down due to sensitivity challenges i.e. the detector readings were constantly stopping the belt as it detected gold, gold, gold...). Am definitely looking forward to those final stellar grades! An exciting time for Novo shareholders.”
Side note: my personal guess is we are looking at about twice the average 8 g/t Wits grade? So let’s say Novo has 16 g/t. And remember, this Comet Well bulk sample is basically at surface unlike the Wits at up to 4 kilometres underground. I’m on the lower end of that 15-40 g/t RCKS range because I think the average nugget thickness might be less than the 3 mm approximation by RCKS. Again, my number is a guess. What’s the actual grade? We will “soon” know but probably not a good time to be short?
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goldhunter11 wrote: Thanks SilverW for the link. I registered and pull out the full report to check out their calculation.
Redcloud produced a reasonable estimate based on the limited public information available in NOVO NR of 25 April 2018. It would appear that Redcloud has access to and used the same information that we all have in the NR (nothing extra from insiders). Their resuts are shown in Figure 2 with the average value of 36.5gpt (for an average size nugget having a dimension of 0.75cm x 0.75cm x 0.3cm). This was rounded up to ~40gpt.
In a previous post I have estimated the weight the largest nugget (#5 on first row of Figure 2 of the NR) to be ~30g, and the weight of 4 largest nuggets on the 80 nugget board to be approximately 100g. For the sake of a conservative estimate, let's just ignore the weight of the rest of the 76 nuggets. Hence the grade of the 7.143 tonne sample: 100g/7.14 tonne = 14gpt (about the same as the lower limit of 15gpt estimated by Redcloud). This result is ultra conservative, since only 4 largest nuggets out of 80 were counted.
Susequently, I did another estimate using #3.8 nugget (i.e. #8 nugget on the 3rd row on that board) and the grade results came out to be 1cm x 0.625cm x 0.3cm x 19.3 x 80/7.143 tonnes = 40.5gpt., which is almost the same as Redcloud average nugget of 0.75 x0.75x 0.3cm on its Figure 2. It may be just a coincidence to have almost the same result, but eye-balling is not a bad tool for an estimate (at least for an order of magnitude estimate).
So, it would appear that an estimate in the range of 15-40gpt by Redcloud is reasonable, given the public info available (One can extract tons of information from the NR, especially the 2 figures for some dimension of the nuggets and apply some simple math... just have to work a bit harder measuring the nuggets with a finely divided scale).
15gpt is very good for an OP operation. Of course, 40gpt grade is much better. Even the fine gold component (which was not included in the above estimate) is important. If it is of the order ~10% (WWH used 14% in a previous post). Fine gold would yield 1.5-4gpt. If the tonnage is large enough a fine gold grade of 1.5gpt would contribute significantly to an economical OP operation at CW.
Cheers,
GH
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Silverwhere wrote: Thats an Apr 25 RedCloudKS report quote. Scroll down here for link to full RedCloudKS article . . . . https://www.redcloudks.com/blog-archive/april-2018