Arizona Silver Exploration Inc. (TSX-V:AZS) revealed positive results from re-assays by the metallic screen technique on selected drill hole intervals on its flagship Philadelphia gold project, where it is drilling off an epithermal gold-silver system.
The Vancouver-based exploration company said the highest grade sample in drill hole PRC23-97, which originally reported 51 grams per ton (g/t) gold, soared 42% higher in grade to 72.5 g/t gold thanks to the metallic screen analyses.
For that sample, grades of 74.8 g/t gold were also returned upon re-assaying the original sample using a larger 50-gram pulp size.
Twenty four samples of high and low-grade material were re-assayed to see if they contained visible gold. The samples were all sourced from the spring 2023 reverse circulation drilling campaign.
“Re-assaying of samples with coarse gold is a normal industry practice to gauge if grades are being underestimated simply because a standard 30-gram sample for fire assay can miss coarse gold that might not be represented in a 30-gram split,” explained Greg Hahn, who is the vice president of exploration at Arizona Silver.
“Re-assaying on 24 samples is considered statistically meaningful as we assayed both higher and lower grade material. For all 24 samples the average grade increased by 25.9%,” he added.
Hahn said that going forward Arizona Silver will routinely re-assay high-grade intervals and use the metallic screen technique also on duplicate samples to resolve potential assay discrepancies when the company’s geologist identifies coarse gold in his logging.
“In due course when Philadelphia advances into the evaluation phase much more re-assaying will be done,” Hahn added. “In the meantime, I am delighted that our project continues to have positive outcomes as we continue drilling off this deposit.”
Arizona Silver’s tabulated results show that the high-grade intervals clearly have coarse gold present in the plus 100-mesh size fraction used in the analyses. This coarse gold fraction tends to be under-represented in a standard 30-gram sample preparation for fire assay, noted the company.
As expected, the highest grade samples show the largest amount of coarse gold relative to the lower grade samples. Generally, the results show a “dramatic grade increase” for samples with initial grades of more than 4 g/t gold, according to the company.
Overall, Arizona Silver said the metallic screen technique and re-assaying exercise resulted in a 25.9% increase in average grade of the sample suite.
Contact the author Uttara Choudhury at uttara@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow her on Twitter: @UttaraProactive