Business is heating up and expanding for SPJ Labs, Sudbury’s only privately-run fire assay laboratory.
When the doors opened for business on March 12, 2009, co-owners Jeff Fuller, Peter Larabie and Sav Dagostino were testing the waters to determine the interest level of clients seeking fire assay work for their precious metals.
Despite the fact that they started during one of the worst financial downturns in history, this niche business complemented the strong precious metal market.
Over the last couple of years, business has increased as much as four to five times, according to Dagostino.
They are attracting more clients seeking their expertise, which Larabie believes has become a valuable calling card, considering there are few fire assayers with the level of expertise SPJ Labs possesses. Others have even described Larabie as “being able to smell the gold from the rock.”
Both Dagostino and Larabie are 30-plus year veterans in lab sample preparation and fire assay work. As well, Larabie’s brother, who ran a lab in Russia for the last 24 years, has returned and is working there.
The increased demand for services has led to a fourth partner who comes with an established network of contacts in the mining industry.
A larger location, soon to be finalized, will see an increase in space to 6,000 square feet for the fire assay lab and 3,000 square feet for the sample preparation work, which crushes, grinds and pulverizes the samples. Early spring is the company’s targeted moving date.
Presently, the lab is located at the Fuller Industrial site where six employees work out of 1,200 square feet staggered over two eight-hour shifts.
Fire assaying, a sample preparation technique, is an ancient method of extracting precious metals using heat. Sometimes described as an “art,” the technique has been around since the time of the Phoenicians and is known to be one of the most reliable methods for determining the amount of gold, silver and platinum group metals from an ore sample.
Larabie said there are only a few fire assay labs remaining because about 15 years ago, the trend was to use chemicals. Fire assaying is 100 per cent accurate and takes the product back to a slag, removing hazardous material that is contained and recycled.
“There is no other private fire assay lab in Sudbury that does what we do,” Larabie said.
SPJ Labs performs gold, silver and lead fire assaying with a silver collection. They use a hands-on approach as opposed to a robotic technique.
Larabie prefers hands-on because it allows them to deal with every sample separately and to make the proper flux adjustments necessary to achieve complete removal of all precious metals.
Hands-on is a more desirable method because most of the samples they deal with are complex.
The process is three-fold: the sample prep, the fire assaying and the final chemistry stage called Induction Coupled Plasma (ICP) Atomic Absorption, which SPJ Labs is currently contracting out to MIRARCO and Laurentian University.
Part of the lab’s expansion will include two more fusion furnaces, Rhino crushers and pulverizing units totalling to five furnaces, three crushers and three pulverizing units. Also, they are considering including an ICPAA facility on the premises.
Larabie said the lab will be set up by a Montreal consultant company, Leen, brought in to help SPJ Labs improve productivity at the new site.
The company also received its ISO 9001:2008 certificate for quality assurance. Duplicate samples, in-house standards as well as international standards are used for quality assurance purposes.
Spot checks are done on all consumables such as flux and acid to ensure no contamination.
Feedback has been positive with letters thanking them for speedy turnaround times.
Plans to train and educate new employees in the fire assay work will also occur at the new site.
As the company grows to meet the demand, Larabie and Dagostino see SPJ Labs becoming one of the major players in the gold sampling business within five years.
www.spj.com
