Canada Silver Cobalt Works Inc. announced that the company will begin testing high-grade stamp mill tailings from the Beaver mine and the Castle mine once commissioning of the gravity pilot plant is complete. The testing is expected to begin within 4 weeks. Gravity Pilot Plant: The gravity pilot plant is closed loop with a water recycle step.

It is a two-stage gravity process. The primary step is a spiral concentrator feeding the concentrate to a conventional gravity table. The company has ordered a third gravity concentrating piece of equipment and envisions it to be placed between the spiral and gravity table.

The gravity pilot plant is designed to operate at one tonne per hour of high-grade silver tailings. Stamp Mill Tailings: Once the high-grade silver ore was hand-cobbed from the mines, the lower-grade ore was processed by a simple process of crushing the rock with stamps. The stamps were heavy iron hammers that were dropped onto the ore to release the high-grade native silver from the waste rock.

Banks of these stamps were lined up into one line in the machine and were lifted by cams and then dropped onto the silver ore. Water was the only other requirement that was used in the process. A very simple and effective process in that time to recover the high-grade native silver.

The limitation of the process was that it could not recover the silver in the sulfides. This is the portion which the gravity pilot plant will potentially recover.