DY6 might only have listed last week, but it already has a drilling program underway to test for heavy rare earths and niobium at its flagship Machinga project in Malawi.

To date, the company has drilled seven reverse circulation holes totalling 840m out of the planned 5,000m combined RC and diamond drilling program, with the diamond rig due to be mobilised to site by the middle of July.

Machinga is just 40km east-southeast of Lindian Resources’ Kangankunde project, described as one of biggest rare earth projects outside China.

Previous exploration at Machinga has already proved that niobium and heavy REEs such as dysprosium (Dy) are present with trenching in 2010 yielding a result of 15m grading 0.45% total rare earth oxides (TREO) and 0.75% niobium oxide (Nb2O5) including 5m at 0.54% TREO and 1.34% Nb2O5.

DY6 Metals’ (ASX:DY6) drilling is designed to follow up on historical drilling in 2010 that returned assays such as 11m at 1% TREO (including 330ppm Dy) from a down-hole depth of 12m and 5m at 1.5% TREO from 26m.

It has also completed a 200m by 50m soil sampling program over and to the north of known mineralisation at the Machinga North prospect to delineate extensions of mineralisation for follow-up drill testing.

Samples from the soil sampling have been despatched to ALS laboratories in Johannesburg for preparatory work prior to full suite analysis in Perth while drill samples will be sent to Perth for analysis.

Machinga project

Initial exploration at the Machinga project, which is within the Southern Malawi alkaline province that is known to host a range of light and heavy rare earth (HRE) projects, was carried out in the 1970s.

This identified the 7km long Machinga Main and 4km long Chinduzi radiometric targets that were subsequently tested by Globe Metals & Mining in 2010 with trenching and RC drilling.

Machinga Main is particularly intriguing as the anomaly is continuous along a strike for about 7km, indicating that potential to discover further eudialyte-hosted REE mineralisation may be significant.

Follow-up exploration may also be carried out at Lingoni prospect about 10km east of the Machinga North prospect.

Lingoni also contains radiometric anomalies that were explored using soil sampling and RC drilling with limited available data showing that radiometrics are an extremely robust tool for mapping potential mineralisation.

 

 

 

This article was developed in collaboration with DY6 Metals, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

 

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

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