Aurum Resources is set to launch a maiden 74-hole air-core drilling campaign at its Ryans Find gold project, north-east of Koolyanobbing, after completing trackwork for the rig and a heritage clearance survey.
The company says some 3500m of drilling, to be conducted by Wallis Drilling, will be oriented in multiple transects perpendicular to the prospective greenstone belt. The drillholes will follow-up on gold and base metals anomalies, which it believes correlate to a contiguous magnetic unit, observed in soil sampling during work previously conducted by Aldoro Resources.
Aurum is then planning to turn the drillbit to the right next Wednesday and expects to complete the work within two to three weeks. Assays will follow.
Ryans Find was initially explored for nickel by WMC Resources in the 1970s, but has since seen little modern exploration activity. A later phase of exploration by Aldoro consisted of a first-pass geochemical survey to identify nickel-cobalt anomalies and unveiled the anomalous gold trends that have formed the basis for the current drilling program.
The project is along strike and south-east from the now-mothballed Mt Dimer Tipan Pit that produced some 8500 ounces of gold in the 1990s. Its exploration licences contain more than 50km of strike length across an underexplored portion of the greenstone belt.
Aurum Resources non-executive chairman Troy Flannery said: “The company is very pleased to finally be onsite at Ryans Find and looking forward to commencing their maiden drilling program.”
The company’s other flagship operation is the Penny South gold project in the Youanmi gold district, which lies on structures that host Ramelius Resources’ high-grade Penny West gold mine 800m to the north and the Rox Resources-Venus Metals Corporation's Youanmi gold mine 30km also to the north.
The Penny West mine has produced 154,000 tonnes at 18 grams per tonne gold for 89,000 ounces, with a total mineral resource of 620,000 tonnes at 15g/t for 300,000 ounces from the combined Penny North, Penny West and Magenta lodes. The Youanmi gold mine’s historical production is 667,000 ounces of gold grading 5.42g/t, with an outstanding mineral resource of 24.6 million tonnes at 3.78g/t for 3 million ounces.
Historic drilling at Aurum’s Penny South tenement has yielded significant gold intersections, with one assay returning an outstanding 2m at 33.98g/t despite sedimentary cover of up to 30m and the average depth of drilling less than 40m. A reverse-circulation (RC) drilling program conducted by the company last year on two different structural targets returned positive gold assays of up to 4m at 0.6g/t from 152m in basalt.
Management says the results have defined a broad zone of low-grade mineralisation with pockets of higher grade.
In March this year, the company announced the completion of a 5.2-square-kilometre ground induced-polarisation (IP) gradient array survey at Penny South that targeted nickel-cobalt mineralisation considered to be hosted within ultramafic schists. No first-pass anomalies were observed, but full analysis is pending.
Now, ASX gold bugs will be watching Aurum’s maiden drilling campaign at Ryans Find to confirm its beckoning potential.
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By Gary Kjellgren
