By NICK STEWART
With recent results turning up multiple commercial-grade diamonds, including two exceeding a carat, Dianor Resources Inc. is pinning its hopes on its Wawa-area properties.
Though designed to test the behavior and consistency of the rock, drill results from the company’s 16-square-kilometre Leadbetter Diamond Project have turned up two diamonds; one 1.01-carat diamond is medium brown, intact with octahedral features, while a 1.5-carat stone is a light yellow intact macle.
This complements mid-February results, which featured 2,966 diamonds across four intervals, with the largest weighing 0.022 carats and measuring 1.97 by 1.28 by 1.09 millimetres.
“Much of the stuff we’re turning up is near surface, and the results are very promising,” says John Ryder, president of Dianor Resources Inc.
“We’re definitely encouraged by what we’re seeing out there.”
As the company’s most advanced project, the Leadbetter Conglomerate is a secondary deposit, meaning that its component minerals did not originate from their current location. However, Ryder says there are indicators showing they did not travel a great distance from the original source. This means the original kimberlites may also be in the area, a fact he considers to be “a bonus.”
Although the exact details of future exploration plans will not be available until current data has been analyzed, Dianor is slated to spend up to $4 million on Wawa-area exploration through the rest of the year.
Of that total, Ryder estimates that up to 80 per cent of the company’s time, money and energy in 2007, will be put towards taking a closer look at the Leadbetter property.
“By mid-summer, we’ll be looking to get back to drilling at Leadbetter, but right now, we have so much information from drilling that we have to digest it all, or we’ll get indigestion. We’re right now just logging the drill core, putting everything together in the geological model, and the recommendations will come from there to tell us how much more drilling and sampling will be needed.”
A preliminary geological estimate has shown the Leadbetter conglomerate to contain 556-million tonnes of compacted rock, though how much of the mineral body is diamond-bearing remains to be seen.
An industry-compliant resource estimate is being developed, with the acquisition of the necessary bulk sampling permits expected later this year. Within the next 12 months, Dianor will then collect samples ranging between 10,000 and 15,000 tonnes as part of its bulk sampling program to further define the resource. This effort will also help move the property towards a feasibility stage.
“I can’t talk about economics until we do the bulk sampling and get the value, but the results we’re receiving right now are telling us that we gotta keep carrying on, doing the work.”
The company has also recently moved to expand its property holdings in the area, signing a letter of intent with West Timmins Mining for its 39-square-kilometre GQ Diamond Property. Should surface sampling and mapping prove promising, Dianor will be able to enter into an option agreement to obtain undivided 60 per cent interest in the site by investing $2.5 million over a four-year period.
It has also recently signed a letter of intent with a private company to potentially acquire an additional 412-hectare property from a private company after a 1.88-carat diamond was recently found in the overlying sand and gravel overburden. Small samples of the underlying conglomerate have recovered 94 additional diamonds, with the largest measuring 1.34 by 1.05 by 0.81 millimetres. These types of results indicate that the property shares similarities to Dianor’s promising Leadbetter conglomerate, making for an encouraging prospect, Ryder says.
Located within 30 kilometres of the Leadbetter property, this land package has seen a total of 2,825 metres of drilling across a 500-metre length, with $600,000 in exploration expenditures already complete.
