Maiden drilling at Blue Bell delivers for AusAmerican Mining

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THE DRILL SERGEANT: Australian-American Mining Corporation (ASX: AIW) is conducting its maiden drilling program at the company’s Blue Bell project in Arizona.

The company has reported drilling so far has returned wide zones of copper-gold-silver mineralisation.

AusAmerican has received the results from the first three holes of the 30 drill hole program with assays from another six holes expected to be received by the end of February.

Results include:

–    9 metres at 2.2 per cent copper equivalent (CuEq) (1.8 per cent copper, 0.3 grams per tonne gold and 19.6 grams per tonne silver) from 8 metres;

–     8m at 0.8 per cent CuEq (0.7 per cent copper, 0.1g/t gold and 3.3g/t silver) from 21m; and

–    40.4m at 0.8 per cent CuEq (0.7 per cent copper, 0.1g/t gold and 5.5g/t silver) from 14m.
 
Zones of mineralisation also included high-grade components of:

–    1m at 12.8 per cent CuEq (11.2 per cent copper, 0.6g/t gold and 93.2g/t silver) from 11m;

–    4.5m at 2.3 per cent CuEq (2 per cent copper, 0.3g/t gold and 7g/t silver) from 16m; and

–    3m at 1.9 per cent CuEq (1.4 per cent copper, 0.3g/t gold and 19.8g/t silver) from 31m.

“We are encouraged by the results of the first three holes,” AusAmerican managing director Richard Holmes said in the company’s announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.

“In particular we are pleased with the widths and grades returned so far.

“If these results can be repeated over the remaining holes, it will give us more confidence that a resource can be identified by Q3 2013.

“At this stage, although we are growing in confidence at the prospectivity of the project, it is early days yet and we are determined to use a conservative outlook when reporting to shareholders.

“We will let the project prove that it has potential on the back of the assay results that we will report to the market over the next 6-8 weeks.”

 

Blue Bell cross section showing recent drill intercepts. Source: Company announcement

 

AusAmerican said all three holes were collared in an area which appears to be a small, backfilled open pit.

Mineralisation starts immediately below the open pit fill where the company has assumed a portion of the ore body has been removed by previous small scale mining activity.

AusAmerican considers the results further validate its exploration model of a lower grade stock work mineralisation surrounding higher grade massive sulphide lenses.

It also believes the results support its previously released exploration target for the project.