The California Creek Operation is located about 100 kilometres south west of Cairns in north Queensland. The mine is accessible 190 km by sealed road from Cairns to Mount Garnet and then by gravel road some 30 kilometres to the mine site.
Bookall Mining Company Pty Ltd holds 16 granted mining leases over about 24 kilometres of California Creek. All Plans of Operation for environmental diligence are in place and all tenements are in good foot and standing.
Bookall Mining Company Pty Ltd purchased the operation from Prince Alfred Mines (the Bird Family) in 2004. The Bird Family were well known in north Queensland tin mining circles for over 40 years.
Treatment Plant
The 90 cubic metre/hour treatment plant consists of a feed bin of about 50 cubic metres capacity with an apron plate feeder under its entire length discharging onto a 3.65 m x 1.5 m (12 ft x 5 ft) double deck vibrating screen. The oversize is discharged into a bin which is emptied by the R15 Euclid dump truck. Undersize gravitates to an 8/6 gravel pump which dewaters through two of 15 inch cyclones feeding into two 8 x 4 foot Bendelari jigs.
The hutch product of these two primary jigs is then pumped to a cleanup jig which extracts the coarser tin. The entire tail of the cleanup jig gravitates over a tertiary jig. A curvilinear table can be used to upgrade the concentrate from the tertiary jig.
All of the concentrates are then run through a magnetic separator to bring them to saleable grade of +70% Sn.
The plant is driven by a 300 kVA Detroit genset.
Water is obtained from a small dam which can be fed from the larger dam upstream. There is sufficient room for both rock and sand tails.
There is also equipment on site and accomodation units.
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