The playbook — gold · October 19, 2026
Icon keeps growing: 68 holes and a 46 m hit at 6.5 g/t
Benz drills a tight grid across the first kilometre of a 3 km trend in Western Australia, with a maiden resource the company targets for Q1 2027.
Benz Mining dropped results from 68 reverse-circulation holes at Icon, part of its Glenburgh gold project in Western Australia. The holes were drilled on a tight 50-by-25 metre grid — close enough spacing to map a deposit, not just hunt for one. The flagship hole, 26CN120, cut 46 metres grading 6.5 grams of gold per tonne from 454 metres down (that works out to roughly 299 gram-metres, a single number that captures both how thick and how rich an intercept is). Other holes returned stacked lenses — hole 26CN129 hit 42 metres at 3.0 g/t and then 39 metres at 3.1 g/t in the same hole — plus near-surface gold, like 46 metres at 2.5 g/t from just 24 metres down.
This is a scale story, not a one-hole story. The grid covers the first kilometre of a 3-kilometre trend, defining a system 100 to 200 metres wide and reaching past 500 metres deep. What matters is repetition: dozens of broad 60-to-90 metre intervals at moderate grades of 1 to 2 g/t, with high-grade lenses recurring inside single holes. One eastern step-out, hole 26CN201, returned 12 metres at 5.4 g/t from 390 metres (about 341 to 352 metres below surface) — the release says this traces the mineralized system along the 1 kilometre of trend drilled so far, though it does not state how far beyond known mineralization that eastern hole steps out. CEO Mark Lynch-Staunton ran feasibility and recommissioning work on Barrick’s multi-million-ounce Bulyanhulu mine. The stock is up 87% over three months while the junior gold index rose 19% and gold itself gained 4% — almost entirely company-specific, not a rising tide.
The honest caveats are specific. True widths are not stated: the holes are angled into folded lenses that change orientation, so the drilled lengths may overstate real thickness. The company applied a lenient 5-metre allowance for internal waste, which can broaden reported intervals. No assay lab, method, or quality-control data appears in the text provided. Lynch-Staunton is both the CEO and the Qualified Person signing off the technical disclosure, and he owns securities — so the independent technical check is absent. There is still no maiden resource; every scale claim rests on intercepts. That resource is targeted for Q1 2027, with more Icon assays expected as drilling finishes and a first test of a newly mapped fourth camp flagged for the near term. The eastern growth and fourth-camp claims rest on mapping, not assays.