To our Shareholders and Investors
Progress At The Bayhorse Silver Mine.
Over the last three months we have made steady progress in advancing our Bayhorse Silver Mine to full production status.
But what have we actually done? As announced in our January news release
BHS2017-01,we received positive results from the Ore-Sorting testing from Steinert US. Modern day Ore-Sorting is a far cry from the back breaking hand-sorting the old time miners did, where they hand picked out the rich high grade from the muck.
Our latest news release ,
BHS2017-07, announced us ordering and financing a Steinert KSS100 X-Ray Transmissive (XRT) Ore-Sorter that will sort up to 40 tons of mineralized material per hour, removing a substantial amount of waste material from the processing stream and helping to reduce the cost of upgrading the mineralization.
Everyone who goes through airport security is familiar with X-Ray technology. Their hand luggage, and sometimes their bodies, go through a similar process that we are doing to the mined material, except we are identifying the mineralization and keeping the good stuff automatically..
We have completed and commissioned the set up of the crushing plant along with processing equipment, getting all the bugs out that comes with a new installation, and we have started upgrading the mineralized material to a direct shipping grade, of between 100 oz/t (3,000 g/t) and 160 oz/t (5,000 g/t) .
We reported this in our news release
BHS2017-05 and we are commencing active underground operations to supply the processing facility.
Most mining operations crush all the mined rock to extract the minerals and that comes at a price, in machinery and labor, and many times also leaving a lot of the good stuff in the ground, as it is not economical to mine. To put things in perspective, we expect our average mined grade to be between 528 g/t - 622 g/t silver (17 -20 ounces per ton) silver, or a little over 1.1lb per ton of silver.
That means for every ton (2,000lb) mined, 1,999 pound of that is waste. So assuming we mine and process our planned 100 tons per day at our expected grade, we will end up with an average 1,700 to 2,000 ounces of silver per day and sifting through a lot of waste to get it. By reducing the amount of waste material at the beginning of the process, we can reduce the cut-off grade, increase throughput, and reduce our operating costs, and that will all flow to the bottom line.
Now that everything is set up, we are ready to do some serious mining. We have an excellent highly experienced mining team in place, and they are backed up by our senior mining engineer, Dr. Bill Willoughby, and our senior geologists, Dr. Clay Conway and Dr Stewart Jackson, so our shareholders and investors can have confidence in what we are doing.
We look forward to updating you as we continue move forward
Thanks
Graeme O'Neill
President & CEO