Hole 7 at Solgold’s Cascabel project in Equador has now terminated at a depth of 1672.76 metres. Before the drill stopped turning however, the company encountered substantial intersections of copper-gold mineralized material on the southwest edge of the Central Magnetic Feature at a depth of just over 570 metres.
The company also hit visible copper sulphides in an intersection from 1,251.26 to 1,298.3 metres down hole which continued, but slowly diminished, down to the bottom of the hole at 1,672.76 metres.
Assays from material extracted from 1,251.26 metres to 1,600 metres down hole are expected within a week, whilst the remaining assays from 1,600 to 1,672.76 metres down hole are expected within four weeks.
Solgold is now re-positioning the drilling rig to begin drilling Hole 8 of the current campaign at Cascabel which will be drilled from a previously existing pad. T
hough the pad was previously used to drill Hole 5 of the program, Hole 8 will be drilled at a different angle to target the MVI magnetic anomaly at a point that is approximately 100 metres north-northeast of the upper contact of the high-grade zone encountered in Hole 5.
A revised interpretation of the magnetic data at Cascabel, using an improved version of the widely accepted University of British Columbia magnetic interpretation system, has provided the company with a better understanding of the mineralization at Cascabel and has, so far, been found to correlate well with the drill results returned to date.
And, while all that drilling’s been going on, the company’s Quantec Orion IP geophysical equipment has been released by customs in Ecuador, transported by mule, set up on site, and commissioned.
The Quantec team began 3D surveying on 3rd August and is expected to take roughly three to four weeks to complete a detailed data collection phase. From there, raw data will begin to trickle in to the company before a full report is received in October of 2014.
“The company continues to progress key aspects of the exploration program at the Cascabel Project with the imminent commencement of Hole 8 in the Central Zone, the commencement of the Orion 3D IP survey, and preliminary metallurgical test-work on drill core from Hole 5”, said chief executive Alan Martin.
“In addition, we are encouraged by the converging agreement between observations made by our geological team and a refined magnetic vector inversion (MVI) model which has become available in the past fortnight. A surface exploration program in the area west-northwest of Alpala will also be initiated in August to extend the soil grid over magnetic anomalies along structural strike from Alpala. I look forward to providing progressive updates as we advance our flagship Cascabel Project on multiple fronts.”