Grumpy,

My experience with drilling quartz with my hand held drill is that its easier to drill than the host rock. When we look for gold here, the gold is usually found along the contact, unless you have nuggety gold. The contact being where the quartz joins the host rock. When I take a channel sample, I always like drilling the quartz hole compared to the host rock because I can drill that hole twice as fast.

When you are drilling, as I am sure you know, you usually do not drill down dip a vein. The idea is to pierce the vein at an angle to get a width and grade. To drill directly down a quartz vein, which is occasionally done, only gives you very little info on the vein. This is not how explo companies prove up their resource. So if you are going in and out of 10-40 cm quartz veins, this slowness would not really be recognized.

Getting down to 24 m on a 12 hr shift, is not the average. The 40 m per 12 hr shift is more reasonable as an average. There are times when 100 plus meters are acheived in a 12 hr period, while there are times like you say only 20-30 m are acheived. These 20-30 times are made up of breakdowns, problems with the bits, etc. Sometimes if you are drilling aroud faults or pegmatic material for instance, you could have some broken up pieces of the fault clog and then you would have to pull the rod. We are in one of those type of environments where we have many faults, BUT, we have the Quantec to put out where the faults are so the geo,s can miss these trouble spots.

Most of the drills weigh around 9 tons that are capable of up to 1000m, even the smaller drills are still capable of at least 500m and weigh 9 tons. To get down smaller, then you are getting down to rigs capable of drilling up to 200m, then the porta drills. So, we know we want at least 200 m holes drilled, most likely 400m, so that means we have the medium rig.

The core retreival and splitting is done usually on site while the drill is still drilling, this does not take time from the bit. There is a core shack usually set up on the property for the geos to inspect the core before and/or after splitting.

So, I guess I am saying I don,t agree that drilling will be as slow as you say.

I would like to hear from BAH on this subject because he is part of a drilling crew in the James Bay lowlands where they are putting in deep holes. He can most likely give us some more facts.