A readership survey recently conducted by our editorial staff gave us some very important indications about what you want from The Northern Miner Magazine. Whil e those of you who replied to the survey enjoy the magazine, a sizeable body of the respondents want more technical information on the mining and milling side o f things. Being so closely associated with The Northern Miner newspaper, we have concentrated heavily on geology and exploration and perhaps less on mining than we initially planned.
The first two issues of this year reflect our commitment towards more production-oriented material. Last month the emphasis was on production drilling; this t ime it is on maintenance. As Keith Bowley notes in our cover story, many mine ma nagers don’t pay much attention to maintenance. Neither do mining publications, even though it eats up from 35% to 55% of a mine’s total costs.
In order to fill this gap, we approached Bowley to write this month’s cover story and to submit an ongoing column on the subject of maintenance. In the next f ew months we will be running a 2-part series on the duties of the first-line for eman and his struggles between management’s efforts to cut costs and his require ment to repair equipment often pushed to failure point.
This issue also takes a look at the new crop of gold mines in Canada — 12 of them in all. This is a record for gold mines in recent years, and although many of them are admittedly small, small mines sometimes grow up into big mines. A recent column in a Toronto newspaper chastised Canadian investors for not spending on capital items such as mines. The columnist obviously has little inkling of what is going on in our business. The fact is that next year will proba bly see a similar number of new mines, with an even larger aggregate capacity than those c oming on this year. Some sunset industry.
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