from william bailey of wsf - auswatch news., page-3

I think his comments re Rocklands being stronger to the south in pionts 3 & 4 is an exciting prospect for GBZ

Kevin Andrusiak | May 07, 2008
Article from: Dow Jones Newswires

IT would be too easy to write that it now appears the sceptics are fast becoming true believers of the Cudeco story.

Daily Assay is always up for the path of least resistance, so here goes; “It now appears the sceptics are fast becoming true believers of the Cudeco story”.

Anyway, forget whether Wayne McCrae is smiling or not, with what he is reading these days, and instead take a look at the renewed investor interest in Cudeco and its Rocklands project.

It comes despite the fact that Cudeco is still many months away from ever releasing the long-awaited update to its JORC resource for the copper “whopper”.

But there's good reason for that, as our mate Ian in the US took time out to inform Daily Assay.

You see, Ian had access to the Rocklands deposit in the early 1990s, well before Wayne and company set about drilling the bejesus out of it.

Ian has no shares in Cudeco, but is a member of the Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy.

Right from the outset, Ian said Wayne should be congratulated for driving the project as far as they have.

He also admits the team he was involved in could only do preliminary work on the project, but what they learned from that was really important and should help the Cudeco faithful understand what is going on at Rocklands in 2008.

Far be it for us to try and paraphrase Ian's email to us, so we offer his six points on Rocklands in their entirety.

1. The host geology is primarily volcanic tuffs, which, while stratigraphically aligned, are discontinuous when it comes to ore-reserve control. The requirements of Terra Search are entirely reasonable given this type of rock behaviour. This does not detract from the deposit, but rather it identifies the difficulties inherent in attempting reliable ore-control measures and avoiding dilution when it comes to mining.

2. The extensions being talked about, remote from Rocklands itself and over towards the Wilgar, are to be expected, though the Wilgar is quite small in itself.

3. The system on which the Cudeco ground sits is part of a major regional volcanic event that commences at the Great Australian Mine in Cloncurry and can be tracked by satellite imagery to well beyond the Cudeco ATPs to the north-west.

4. It is just to the south of Rocklands where the volcanic system becomes much thicker.

5. This sequence was originally mapped as a sedimentary suite, but the work conducted by my team clearly indicated that a volcanic sequence was on offer and this changed the prospectivity of the area quite dramatically. Costeaning, detail trench mapping with geochemistry and petrology confirmed the existence of such a rock sequence.

6. An interesting feature of the deposit is that the total rare earths reached as high as 909ppm (parts per million). It is unknown if this will affect the overall economics.

Ian's final point is this: “Can it be made into a large mine? A good chance, given its geological pedigree.”

Daily Assay reckons the most important issue that shareholders should take out of this is from point 1: Cudeco really has no option but to keep drilling because of the deposit-type and to avoid any dilution when Cudeco - or whoever - gets around to mining Rocklands