Surefire Resources is keen to keep its drill bits spinning as it looks to bring in more rigs across the company’s gold, iron ore and vanadium projects in Western Australia. Having just wrapped up a round of RC drilling and a diamond hole at its gold and vanadium projects, Surefire is now lining up a rig for its iron ore venture it hails as the highest-grade magnetite resource in WA’s Mid West region.
Surefire Resources Managing Director, Vladimir Nikolaenko said: “Concurrent planning and executing diamond drilling, RC drilling, geochemistry and geophysical review within the company’s three large high-quality stand-alone project areas will advance these projects and provide significant news flow for our shareholders.”
At the company’s Yidby gold project, a total of 23 RC holes for 2754m have been completed to extend known gold mineralisation and test additional surface geochemical anomalies.
At the start of the month, Surefire announced the drilling intersected wide quartz zones of more than 30m in width and an unexpected quartzose felsic porphyry up to 90m wide and rich in sulphides.
The samples have been submitted to ALS laboratories for analysis, with all results expected within 12 weeks and selected samples to be received earlier.
The company’s gold deposit is described as a blind deposit, lying beneath 10m to 25m of largely barren transported overburden that masks the mineralisation below.
With the extensive use of specialised geochemistry methods and targeted drilling, it appears Surefire has been able to grow its gold system up to 400m away from the initial discovery site that hosts an array of broad intersections.
Notable hits from the discovery zone include 100m at 0.53 grams per tonne gold from 96m, containing 13m at 2.16 g/t gold and another 40m strike going 3.01 g/t from a shallow 24m containing 4m at an impressive 26.57 g/t.
The last drilling campaign at the gold project intersected further broad hits, including 56m at 0.60 g/t gold from 12m containing a higher grade interval of 16m at 1.39 g/t and another 8m strike going 1.43 g/t from 18m.
The Great Northern Highway cuts across the project, 40km south-west of the former gold rush settlement Paynes Find in WA’s Mid West. Notably, the project area is surrounded by three significant gold deposits hosting more than a million ounces each.
The company is currently in the tender process of securing a diamond drill rig for a six-hole program planned at Yidby, with the proposed work expected to generate solid geological data to bolster the structural interpretation of the system.
Further RC exploration will be planned based on the results of Surefire’s upcoming work with a diamond drill.
At Surefire’s vanadium project, Victory Bore, the company hit its target with one diamond hole designed to provide data for geotechnical and metallurgical test work in advance of open-pit optimisation work.
An RC rig is on-site at Victory Bore and poised to begin 4000m of infill drilling into the project’s inferred resource of 237 million tonnes at 0.43 per cent vanadium pentoxide. Surefire has submitted a mining licence application over the entire project area.
On its iron ore front, Surefire has planned up to 5000m of RC drilling at the company’s Perenjori iron ore project, with the work planned within an area of wide and consistent-grade magnetite. The upcoming campaign will infill the currently 200m spaced drill lines to a spacing of 100m.
The drilling is expected to follow on from the work at Victory Bore and will use the same rig.
As the ore body at Perenjori exhibits a relatively shallow dip angle,
Surefire will aim for as much resolution as it can manage to increase the tonnes per vertical metre achievable within an open-pit mine.
With a few irons heating up in the fire, Surefire is likely to have attracted a few onlookers with its upcoming campaign.
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By Matt Birney
