bigkev14... agreed... i used to work for a company called geotechnics and part of the job was planning access routes to drill sites eg. at hillside station, the very country where a lot of these lithium prospects are...
(after all the preliminaries you mentioned... then.... there's physical access)...
1...geological team interpreting air photography plan a route. 2... 4 wheel drive access to trace and "flag" the route. 3...where 4 wheel drive access is impossible, foot access is necessary, with camping gear, food, water and pegs etc for overnight stay at your destination if you can reach it in a day. 4... call in helicopter and a few selected dozer contracters to quote on the access track and if it's even possible. (the contractor will have to know the capabilities of drill rigs and the grade/slope of tracks that rigs can traverse). 5...drive the contractors to a suitable level landing site as close as you can get to the prospect. 6...if the helicopter is a 2 seater fly each of the geological crew and the contractors over the planned route one at a time to finalize the size of dozer needed, the route and prices. 7...the sucessful tenderer will then have to mobilize as close as they can get to the prospect with a low loader and then crawl the dozer overland from that point. 8...after all that the drilling contracter has to drive over the access track before mobilizing in the event they can or cant risk their machinery on the job.
and that is why you find companies like tmb (tambourah) drilling for the 3rd time on useless targets when other areas go undrilled...(because they dont have targets worth going to all that trouble for). this company rdn is a carbon of tmb in it's mo, they haven't got serious targets so dont expect any worthwhile drilling in the near future... and why i have to laugh when i see tmb uses a helicopter just to look for pegmatites.
RDN Price at posting:
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