The playbook — copper · August 27, 2026
Wedge hole 10 hits 31.95m of 2.52% copper-equivalent
A step-out drill hole at a historic New Brunswick camp lands a wide massive-sulphide zone, but the stock sat out a strong copper rally.
Nine Mile Metals drilled a hole at its Wedge Mine in New Brunswick’s Bathurst Mining Camp and hit a wide band of sulphide rock. The headline number from DDH WD-26-10: 31.95 metres of 2.52% copper-equivalent (a blended grade that rolls copper, zinc, lead, silver and gold into one copper figure). Inside that was a richer core of 14.15 metres at 3.73% copper-equivalent, and a peak stretch of 4.15 metres at 5.16%. The company says these are true widths — meaning the rock really is that thick, not just thick-looking because the drill hit it at an angle.
This is a genuine polymetallic hit, not a thin fluke. Run the gram-meter math — grade times thickness, the yardstick for how much metal a hole actually found — and the full zone scores about 80.5 percent-metres of copper-equivalent, a solid result for this camp. The zone gets stronger in silver, zinc and lead as it goes deeper, which is textbook behavior for these deposits and encouraging for chasing it down. The technical work was signed off by VP Exploration Gary Lohman, P.Geo., who is the company’s Qualified Person and — the release states plainly — not independent of the company. Nine Mile’s shares returned 0.7% over the same three-month window in which copper gained roughly 5.9% and the copper-miner peer index (COPX) rose 12.2%. This is a micro-cap: the largest recent raise was C$400,000, and a February 2025 placement converted C$231,150 of matured loans the company could not repay in cash.
Now the honest part. That copper-equivalent grade leans heavily on zinc and silver at aggressive metal prices, using a flat 95% recovery across all five metals — which the company itself flags as premature. Copper alone is a more modest ~0.93% across the full zone. The company’s release does not disclose a cut-off grade for the reported weighted-average intervals. And this is one step-out hole; strike continuity and lens shape across the drill pattern are not demonstrated here. No mineral resource estimate exists yet. What to watch: more certified assays from ALS Global, planned holes on the western side of Wedge, and an eventual NI 43-101 report with a resource estimate. The company says timing for all three has not been stated.