A hammer mil only smashes the ore into a fine grind. It does not seperate the gold from the other materials. If you have 20x400kg hammer mills running at the same time you will have 8tonnes of fine ore stockpiled after 1 hour which will then need to be processed to extract the gold. how do you think this gets processed? It is either panned and recovered on the gold table or it is put through the gravity circuit. Obviously they could not economically pan 8tonnes of ore every hour. And if they could I guarantee you nuggets would be stolen. So don't waste your time looking for more hammer mills as they are not the solution. The solution (short-term) is a ball mill and flash flotation cell. What shareholders should be asking is why the hell has this not been installed yet and when will it be installed?
Long term the solution is a CIL circuit at Sertao.
When this management team initially claimed these tiny hammer mills had saved the company they where not using the Gekko to process the fine ore. In fact they actually said
"these initial results show that the recovery and grade can dramatically improve when it is not processed in the current gravity recovery plant"
What did they do then? - bought a 25tph hammer mill and processed the ore in the current gravity recovery plant!!! absolutely unbelievably stupid and detrimental to shareholders. Whoever made this decision should resign immediately. The company raised around $6m earlier this year and they should have used a fraction of that to sort the plant out.
Heads should roll here. Gray should be replaced immediately, preferably, IMO, with someone who had experience with the Serabi mine which had the same issues with a narrow vein deposit.
Again a $10m market cap for a company in JV negotiations with the 3rd largest gold producer in the world is cheap - but with these guys in charge nobody will touch it.
They have done so bad that they managed to negotiate the $8m credit note deal but then mess things up so badly that the SP has dropped below the limit that the notes can be converted!! It is unbelievable when you think about it.
