Assay shortcuts and the drop of company credibility The most difficult but wonderful "problem" a gold company can have is how to quantify the amount of coarse, nuggety gold present in the drill core or RC chips. The larger the gold "flakes", the larger the problem. We worked on this a lot at the Homestake Minine in South Dakota, which, when in high-grade ores, had up to 80-85 % locally very coarse free gold in the drill core, which was separated off from the ore stream with spirals and jigs. My old dear boss Olin Hart told me, son, we'll know the average grade when all of the material in the stope will have been mill-processed!".
Large-kg screen-fire assays followed up by 5 assay ton assays for the remainder fractions were found to be the best . New Found has even larger gold particles the Homestake, and thus has an even bigger problem. If these cores were pure quartz, maybe their new idea might work, but there is a lot of opaque wallrock in the NFG cores.
In what is believed to perhaps be an ore zone, I would photograph the core and the crush all of it and screen fire the entire core, and run 5AT Au assays on the tails. This was metallurgist Richard Kunter's approach at HMC. Shareholders will actually believe this procedure, and not dump the stock based on some unproven quasi-assay techqnique,. Speedy