first gold pour, page-15

looking at the second last page of the March quarterly is an unlabelled view of the processing plant

these are mostly my guesses about how it works

first off the ore is dumped into a grizzly, which separates out most of the larger host dyke rocks but allows all of the quartz to go into a hopper beneath

this is conveyed up to a jaw crusher - near the top of the conveyor is a scrap iron detector or electro-magnet - don't want any scrap iron or steel going into the system

the jaw crusher crushes the ore down to maybe 25mm, possibly less

this feeds into a vertical shaft impactor, which probably breaks the ore down to about 1 mm

looks like a very watery slurry is then created, which feeds into one or more hydroclones (the slurry spins around like a cyclone and heavier gold-bearing material is thrown outwards and collected beneath)

not sure what happens next, looks like the heavier slurry feeds into one or more simple concentrators to produce a "concentrate" (about 10% of the original ore becomes "concentrate")

the tailings then feeds onto the floor or into a small truck and is allowed to drain (dewatering) - which then goes to the tailings dump as virtually dry sand

the equipment shown bottom left of the picture processes the concentrate

looks like the watery component of the concentrate goes into a sump and is pumped up to an in-line pressure jig (Gekko's free gold separator)

the dry material is loaded into a crusher (regrind module) which after some reduction in particle size is conveyed to another in-line pressure jig (guessing a bit here)

somewhere in there the sulphides are separated out - MCO can't process them so they could be packaged to sell

the free gold goes into the gold room probably onto a wave table

the gold is manually scraped off the wave table into a crucible, which is placed in a small furnace to be melted and poured into a mould

general comments:

the system is small, we know that, so I expect the management will be thinking of building another one when this one proves successful

the processing plant is somewhat labour intensive so I'd expect it will be upgraded to full automation over the next few months

the design is exceptionally good - typical of what Gekko produces