Good stuff Miskealp, while on the subject of "narrow" mining, some of our Blackbirds intercalculated chromite beds are narrow but as SGS labs pointed out in NOTs release back in April...
METALLURGICAL TESTS ON
BLACKBIRD CHROMITE MINERALIZATION
HIGHLIGHTS of TESTING
Massive chromite is amenable to dense media separation (DMS) at < 2 mm size fractions. Further
testing is planned at the small lump and chip size to confirm that direct shipping ores can be
produced by DMS;
Narrow intercalated chromite beds and heavily disseminated chromite within ultramafic beds can
be combined to produce a high quality concentrate using conventional gravity separation;
Bench-scale gravity concentration tests provide Cr recoveries of 87% on massive chromite, and
80% on a mixture of heavily disseminated chromite and intercalated chromite beds;
Gravity concentrates grade 51.9 to 53.4% Cr2O3 with Cr:Fe ratios of 2.2 to 2.4 and SiO2 below 3%,
suitable as metallurgical concentrate for ferrochrome production;
The potential for generation of high value-added products such as foundry sands, refractories, or
chemical feedstocks by further slightly lowering silica contents to below 1% is being investigated
by continued metallurgical test work.
My point is that no matter how narrow some sections may appear they will all factor into the fray one way or another and ultimately add great economic value to the deposit. Even the 122.9m of .56% nickel at AT 12 will make it out of the ground.
TABLE 2: SELECTED ASSAYS FROM AT12
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from to int
Hole ID (m) (m) (m) Ni% Cu% Pt g/t Pd g/t Au g/t Ag g/t
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NOT-08-2G11 90.0 212.9 122.9 0.56 0.29 0.22 0.79 0.05 0.86
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including 137.9 141.0 3.1 2.56 0.44 0.31 3.12 0.65 4.80
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including 164.4 169.9 5.5 2.38 3.05 0.92 2.62 0.22 5.54
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