This is not correct. Wolf employed a lot of locals that never...

This is not correct.

Wolf employed a lot of locals that never worked in the industry before, this was a major mistake as they only hire a few ex-pats (South African and Australian) to help with the numbers. They also picked up a lot of the Imerys (China Clay) operators and supervisors. This is were some of the problems really kicked in with operations. They had a very steep learning curve, and brought some bad habits from 40 years of steady operation at the China Clays to a complex metallurgical plant in Hemerdon. This plant have everything from fines spirals and tables to DMS separation using a mixture of ferrosilicate and magnetite to get the required cut SG, filtering, drying, reduction kiln, LIMS and HIMS magnetic separation, plus all the water and tailing's circuit.

The biggest issue was the ore and the management of the plant. Everything tended to be reactive and Wolf did not seem to have a good handle on just how abrasive the clay and ore mix was. The operations workforce was not unionised and was trying there best, they too felt the frustration with the plant operations and in the early days there was a lot of operations turnover at the with the plant.

I don't think this will be the end as RCR have too much tied up with the project. It may be a care and maintenance situation, although the environmental order on the low frequency issue noise issue will mean that it will be hard to restart again, and there was a considerable local (Sparkwell and Cornwood) opposition to the mine operation, mainly from people who had moved there since the old mining had ceased after WW2. Generally most of the locals wanted the mine and only a few did not.

Also Wolf had been making ongoing improvements to the operation especially around the reduction kiln and DMS circuit and the ore is finally now into the hard granite so the DMS will become more important.

I hope they can turn it around with a resurgence in Tungsten price, this is the real key for the operation.

The operations work force was not unionised. The construction workforce was.