CopperKen, Colorado1 started the search for the "missing con" after his tour and he was trying to determine where all the HT ore went. He figured that 200,000 tons had been removed. I concluded that there must be several thousand tons of con or else the mill workers were fumbling around trying to get the mill process working properly (and that the ore must have been transformed into huge piles (the same 200,000 tons!) of tailings.)
Now I see posters talking yet again as if they presume that the mill is tuned up using low grade ore and that it will automatically do just fine on high grade ore once it's utilized. No one has the slightest support for that kind of presumption. Why not put in barren rock and tune it up if that's such a great idea?! Is there some optimal peak of low grade ore that is well known to be what is used to tune up mills? Of course not. People are just home-spinning the reasoning here with qualitative feel-good logic.
I concluded before that either they have several thousand tons of quality con or that some kind of "joke" has been going on wherein what has been processed is not what we were led to believe was processed.
Where is all that HT ore?
Why was the Bawana low grade ore mentioned recently?
Why don't copper flotation experts buy CPRK and post on this forum? Wouldn't that be great!
But to directly answer your question, yes, those possible early truckloads could be part of the missing con - hopefully a very small part.
None of this reduces one bit my high level of enthusiasm about yesterday's PR. I continue to expect that the ball mills may not be capable of getting production up to 5000 tpd so I don't expect that level to be reached for months and, perhaps, not without some internal reconfiguration of the mills or up-sizing them.
