True to its word and just a day after revealing it had divested its non-core base metals project to focus on gold, Classic Minerals is back in the field drilling at the high-grade Kat Gap project, south of Southern Cross, WA.
The company had considerable drill success at the gold project last year and has initiated a short program to extend the strike of the mineralisation northwards and test other positions up-dip at the rock contact between a granite and ultramafic unit and within the granite itself.
Classic has produced some cracking, shallow intercepts of gold at Kat Gap to date, including 10 metres grading 30.78g/t gold from 28m down-hole, 8m @ 19.05g/t gold from 32m down-hole and 12m @ 7.52g/t gold from 39m down-hole, in separate drill holes.
CEO Dean Goodwin said: “This latest round (of drilling) will be focussed solely on our Kat Gap project which delivered outstanding results over the previous four drill campaigns. Drilling will again (target) the main granite – greenstone contact of which only 200m of a total 3.5km of potential strike has been tested by the company.”
“We are planning to drill 100m north along strike and also test for high-grade gold mineralisation up-dip from previous bonanza intersections ...”
“Future drilling programs at Kat Gap will focus on testing an 800m long section of the main granite – greenstone contact where current drill line spacings are 100m apart and also within the granite itself where previous geochemical surveying detected high-grade gold near the surface.”
“The granite has been … overlooked by previous explorers. We are of the firm belief that significant gold mineralisation is lurking out in the granite.”
Kat Gap is located about 70km south southeast of Classic’s Forrestania gold project that currently holds 5.36 million tonnes grading 1.39g/t gold for just over 240,000 ounces in three separate prospect areas.
The Kat Gap deposit was a regional discovery for the previous operators in the 1990s and contains non-JORC gold resources of about 36,000 ounces but was never seriously considered a satellite open pit to the Bounty mine operations, due to the prevailing low gold prices at the time.
With gold now worth about four times what it was 20 years ago, the high-grade Kat Gap deposit is now ripe for economic re-evaluation once Classic establishes a maiden JORC-compliant resource.
Last year, the company inked an MoU with Tianye SXO Gold Mining, who own the Marvel Loch processing plant, about 150km north of Kat Gap.
The option effectively means that Kat Gap and the Forrestania gold project mineral resources further north are no longer “stranded” and could be toll-treated at the Marvel Loch plant if the economics work out.
Earlier this year, Classic secured 100% of the Kat Gap gold project from private company Sulphide Resources Pty Ltd for $250,000 and a 2% net smelter royalty on any future production from the area covering the two purchased licences.
Historical drilling at the project is only on 100m to 200m regional line section spacings and the entire contact zone between the granite-ultramafic has a strong, coherent geochemical gold-in-soil anomaly that stretches over 5km long.
Only about half of this strike zone has been targeted with any drilling to date.
After a period of relative quiescence, Classic is back with a boom and looking to build on the previous high-grade results it achieved at Kat Gap.
Given its recent run of success at the project, the drilling program will be keenly watched.
By Matt Birney
