I'm hoping that reposting hznm91's message will make it more readable, and also make my reply more understandable.
"The trenching and crushing at the property was completed prior to the holiday break in 2010. The processing and sampling was completed on Tuesday, January 25."
When they say the sampling is complete, what does this mean. My understanding was the lab has finished the assays for that material. I guess not or they would have grades to release with this news.
I assume now it just means the material is ready to be sent to the lab?
There is substantial processing of the bulk sample material between the dump-truck load of crushed stone and the final sample that is sent to the lab.
Five separate grab samples of about 20kg each are taken from an individual bulk sample (of which there are ~250, I would imagine), which is itself somewhere around 10 tonnes of material. Each of those five grab samples is individually crushed to a finer consistency at the coreshack, and then divided using a splitter until the lab sample is obtained. The remainder is labelled and stored at the coreshack.
(So, the news release indicates that the GNH sample prep work has been completed, and all samples would by now be on their way to the lab. Samples would have gone out on a daily basis, as soon as they were ready. They didn't hold them, to send them in all at the same time.)
Those five lab samples from the one bulk sample will then be further processed at the Actlabs site, yielding 15 assays in the end. Those 15 assays are then recombined, by statistical methods, to yield a bulk sample assay value. Then all of the individual bulk sample assays in that trench are combined statistically to proved a grade for that trench. Then all the trench assays can be combined to yield an average grade for the deposit zone.
When a similarly rigorous process was conducted on Timmins 1 last year, the grade for the surface 1.5 metres was estimated to be 2.99 g/tonne Au.
But that could still have been an under-estimate of grade. Although a considerable methodological improvement over sampling via diamond drill core, there are still some concerns about whether even this method provides adequate samples, as it still relies on fire assays. The best bulk-sampling program would include actually processing the bulk samples through a gold mill, and determining the yield and recovery % directly.
Lar
