Pasties and pints at the February Mining Sundowner

A change from our usual pub routine last night, the sundowner being held in the student union bar at Penryn's Tremough Campus, to coincide with Camborne School of Mines students' 'pasty and pint' evening, kindly sponsored by the CSM Association.

It was a great opportunity to chat to the always highly motivated CSM students. Sadly, however, there were no mineral processing students amongst the young miners and geologists, as the degree and MSc in minerals engineering no longer exist, although I hear that there are plans to reinstate the MSc in the not too distant future.

Many of the alumni present last night obtained degrees in mineral processing from Camborne. Paul Ainsworth, of slurry system company Paterson & Cooke, was one of the last batch of mineral processors to graduate with a BEng in 2006. In the photo below he is with me and sundowner regular Bentley Orchard. Bentley recently retired and his position at Weir Minerals has now been taken by Luke Rogers, formerly with Deister Concentrator.

Bentley, Luke, Paul and me

Klaas and Tim

At the bar were two more familiar Camborne mineral processors, Klaas van der Wielen and Tim Richards. Klaas and Tim have the daunting task of commuting daily from West Cornwall into Devon, as Klaas is a shift metallurgist and Tim a graduate operator on the Drakelands tungsten-tin mine at Hemerdon on the Dartmoor border. Klaas is a familiar face at Minerals Engineering Conferences, having worked with Selfrag AG, Switzerland after leaving CSM with a PhD. They were relaxing after a hard week on the plant, which had been beset by several shutdowns due to the severe storms that hit south-west England last week, which I fortunately missed due to my time at Indaba. The processing plant at Drakelands has reached its design capacity but apparently still has a long way to go to achieve target recoveries.

Thanks to all involved for a very pleasant evening.

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