Dear Ian Anderson,

i might agree with you, that most mining companies are only dredging and not mining, but not all of them can mine.

1. not enough funds to prospect the area

2. not enough funds to pay expensive professionals

3. not enough funds to buy mineral processing equipment (well for gold they can make an ordinary sluice box using riffles)

4. in south america, brazil, guyana, those "dredging" companies took a lot of gold and diamonds with a small investments and just dredging.

Dredging equipment as you know is very expensive and techniques people are using here allow to extract enough gold and diamonds.

I agree with you that wrong techniques and wrong mining results gold and diamond big looses

thank you for your attention

Virgis Strikas ■

I'm trying to determine the feasability of using a scraper/slusher

for stripping and moving material to my placer washplant.

The quota is approx 250cu.yd in under 4 hours.

Since the washplant, oversize conveyor, and ore pipeline take a day to move, the dragline distance can be optimised. The max depth to bedrock is approx. 35'

Selection of equipment remains obscure. Is there a rule of thumb or standard formula that I could refer to? Most information I come accross is aimed at monster machines in the coal patch and large scale gravel operations. The equipment used in underground applications seems simple enough. But the volumes seems a little low.

If there's any literature you can recomend? ■

Could you explain the dredging for gold system. How it works and all. That is interesting. ■