Often when the gold is nuggety the mill designed to pulverise the sample down to an acceptable grind size for assay will also flatten the nuggety grains of gold instead of reducing them down to the required smaller grind size. In this instance if a 50g charge is taken for assay from the original bulk sample weighing a few kilograms, then those flattened gold particles may either be assayed with the charge or be left back in the risdual sample and remain unassayed leading to high variability in the assay results. The only real solution for this type of gold loss, which is due the highly malleable nature of gold, is to do expensive total fire assays on all of the suspect samples. ie it could also be the assay technique which is a source of loss and lack of reproducibility.
Say the real grade is 5 or 6 times higher than the grade estimated in the infered resource. What does that mean for the size of the resource?? It’s pretty simple maths.
Also the panning seems to indicate the gold is there. Often the old techniques trump the new techniques but you can’t do a BFS off the back of panning results. Esh
