Ann: Vectoring in at Platinum Springs, page-158

I will have to look at the maps but the channels they identified were only a few hundred square metres but the drilling itself may have been spread out a bit more along strike at Platinum Springs and Plat Springs East? As I mentioned before - you cannot just draw a box around an area and say you want to drill in there anymore, that would be too easy and logical, the regulators want to know where you plan on drilling and even modest step outs say 50m or 100m along stike need to be documented and approved, Mike did mention in that interview that the NSW regulators have a special process in place for programs underway that expedite variations of drilling if the drilling locations and plans change on the ground.

Not going to add to your comments about any MD salary or compensation but I have been less than kind sometimes about the rate of progress in the company in my infrequent visits to the IPT discussion boards.

Regarding the loss of samples, its extremely rare in the industry to lose an entire batch of samples, I have heard of it once or twice and pallets can sometimes go missing but usually turn up days/weeks or months later in a trucking yard due to a paperwork screwup or labels and stickers falling off etc. Usually a batch will be an entire pallet or two or a sample cage, not the sort of thing that you can accidentally drop and hide down the back of a truck, you usually need forklifts to move them. Sometimes one or two samples may get lost in transit if they are mistreated or fall off or out of a shrink wrapped pallet but losing a batch of samples is very rare. With trucking companies its almost impossible to insure samples because the insurance is tricky in that the value of the samples is difficult to quantify until you get the assay results back, obviously if the samples are lost then you won't get assays to quantify your loss and make any claim. Most trucking contracts have pretty standard all care but no responsibility clauses in them anyway.

Loss of samples with core is a PITA as quarter core then needs to be recut, loss of RC chips or aircore samples isn't so bad as there are usually large extra spare sample piles/bags of drill cuttings at the drill site and you can resample and send to lab again (using a different trucking company of course).

I have heard of truck rollovers where field staff have been sent out to unpack and repack pallets/cages of numbered sample bags in order to get samples accounted for and sent to the lab but its pretty rare.

I note that IPT 's samples were supposed to go to Intertek Labs in Alice Springs which seems an unusually long and tenuous logistic chain to a lab that isn't particularly close, but maybe that lab had special expertise in PGMs assays or something, and thats why it was chosen. Reading the Table 1 I now see that the sample prep was supposed to happen at Alice Springs and then smaller subsample pulps go to Intertek in Perth for the actual assays, but from the sound of the announcement it looks like the samples never made it to Alice Springs.

In this announcement you can see the map Fig2 on page 2 seems to suggest that they are solely using XRF results in their "calculated ratio values" that they were using to vector to the particular central mafic channels, but when you look closely at that map I think you'd agree that people would want to see a bit more coverage in a systematic way of these XRF results on a map to completely convince themselves that these ratios are actually showing areas known to have enriched Cu Ni and PGMs

Here are some other similar papers about people using XRF and calculated ratios to help out exploration and vectoring to particular rocks/alteration and mineralisation.

For anyone who is interested about ratos of metals in different mafic rocks etc google this and have a read (can't link sorry as its a massive PDF):

Magmatic ore deposits in mafic–ultramafic intrusions of the Giles Event,Western Australia W.D. Maiera, H.M.Howard, R.H. Smithies, S.H.Yang, S.-J. Barnes, ,H.O'Brien, H.Huhma, S.Gardoll.