Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Silver Hammer Mining (CSE: HAMR)(OTC: HAMRF) CEO Peter Ball on Structure, Jurisdiction & Catalysts in 2023

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the newly appointed president and CEO of Silver Hammer Mining, Mr. Peter Ball. Peter, how are you today?

Peter Ball: You know, I'm good. Good to chat with you about Silver Hammer. And you know what? It's a beautiful day in Vancouver and with silvers supposed to have a great decade, I'm excited. So yeah, good day.

Gerardo Del Real: Well listen, congrats on the appointment. Your timing couldn't be any better. Silver's surging today, up nearly 2%, well over the $25 an ounce mark. You mentioned silver setting up for a pretty epic bull run. I want to get into that. I want to get into Silver Hammer. But before that, can you give us a bit about your background?

Peter Ball: Yeah, no. So I've been in the industry 35 years. Recently I attended my 35th Prospectors Developers Association Conference in Toronto. I'm a fifth generation mining guy. All my family's been in mining for about 150 years. A little bit about my background, when I entered the industry in the late 80s, I worked in the engineering side of the game for the first seven, eight years. Then I decided to go corporate, in the financial side, so became a broker at RBC Dominion Securities. Waited for the market to come back a little bit, so I decided to be an analyst at a telco in Canada, and I've been raising money and running mining companies for the last 18 years. Again, so 35 years in the business.

Gerardo Del Real: So you're off to a good start in other words, Peter.

Peter Ball: You know, I wouldn't know what else to do if I didn't do mining. I love it.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, let's get into Silver Hammer and the opportunity. What attracted you to the company? And then of course we have to talk silver and the multiple catalysts that Silver Hammer’s got ahead of it this year.

Peter Ball: Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think any investor is looking at a company to place some of their hard-earned money, there's a number of key factors that personally I look at, because I do a lot of investing myself. And so first of all, management. Is there the right management in place to explore, develop, or advance the assets that they're good at? So the team here at Silver Hammer, and another gentleman I brought on shortly after I started, are known as some of the best silver explorationists in the world. So to take a look at the website, and we'll run through the story.

Secondly, jurisdiction. If you're going to look at a place and you're going to explore some stuff, you have to have the ability to explore, develop, permit, and put something into production at some point. And we're in Idaho, number seven in the world by the Fraser Institute, and them and Nevada consistently ranking in the top 10, but it's number three again. So that is also key.

Third, you got to have the right structure. The tighter the company, the more elastic it will be as it goes forward with its drill holes, its exploration, its development, providing an elastic mechanism to bring the share price higher and rewarding the shareholders. And you got to have the right timing in regards to, “Is the sector that you're involved with exploring for the right commodity at the right time? Is there an issue that's going to drive silver up?” And I think perfectly it's the time where we are.

And third, what kind of assets does this company have? We have brownfield high grade silver assets with a kicker of gold and a kicker of copper. And lastly, we're going to have a heck of a busy year. So you need news flow to ensure that you continue to feed the market what will excite shareholders to continue to follow the story. So there's my six points.

Gerardo Del Real: I couldn't agree more, especially on the structure. It's the very first thing I look at when I'm considering whether to write a check and speculate on a company. Especially in the resource space, and especially in the junior resource space. Let's talk about the assets. You mentioned the brownfield nature of the assets in the portfolio. You just announced the financing. Obviously you're looking forward to having a busy, busy 2023. Tell me about the assets.

Peter Ball: Yeah. So first of all, they're brownfield assets. And if a listener doesn't know what a brownfield asset is it’s in the shadow of a head frame or a previous producer. So we're going to be drilling this year underneath and next to previous high grade assets. So let's start off in Idaho. Idaho we have the Silver Strand high grade project, high grade mine. Previous producer, late 1970s, only went down to 90 meters. But if you look in the Silver Valley where it's located in Idaho, most of these operations go down 1,000 meters, 1,500 meters, up to 2,000 meters. We're at the top of the system, the top of the boiling zone.

In other words, as you look at this project today, with full access at the 90 meter level, there is just below the bottom working drill holes that showed 11 grams of gold and 500 grams of silver sitting right beneath the old workings that were never accessed. And old engineering drawings were showing a declined hit. But also, we have a five kilometer, six, about 5.8 kilometer stretch, or four mile stretch of land that's never been drilled.

So when I got here, I updated the 43-101 document, and I compiled the geophysics from the last 20 years, and I initiated a plan of operation. In other words, to be able to continue to drill it over the next year. When looking at the compilation of geophysics, we found 50 new targets that have never been drilled. They look like sister zones, or parallel zones, or other zones along strike of the Silver Strand. So, exciting. And if you look at the road cuts, there's 10 grams, 11 grams, four grams of gold, and then some high silver. So interesting projects, Silver Valley, big fault cutting it in half, underground workings, underground access, high grade gold, high grade silver. We're going to drill it. That's one of our favorites internally.

And even recently, one of the technical advisors that I've brought on board who's a friend of mine over the last 30 years, Don Birak. So if we’re talking Idaho, Don Birak was the senior vice president of exploration for Coeur Mining. He helped build Coeur, one of the most successful silver companies in the world for its first 10 years. He was also senior VP at AngloGold Ashanti, North America, and also Hudbay when I was at Hudbay in 1991. He lives in Coeur d'Alene. He lives down the road from this mine. It's great to have one of the highest respected silver explorationists, prospector of the year a few years ago, on board with us. So that's Idaho. Interesting. That's why we're raising money. We want to drill this thing for the first time in its history, from surface.

So if we fly down to Nevada, which I actually used to run a gold company in Nevada a few years ago, we just announced actually the plan of operations for the exploration program for what is known as the Eliza Project, which is in central eastern, eastern Nevada, where years ago... It's called the Hamilton District. And in the Hamilton District, over 40 million ounces of silver, and we're talking high-grade silver up to 25,000 grams per tonne, was mined 150 years ago. So there's a number of mines that only went down 50 or 100 feet, sitting on our project, that's never been followed up with one of the highest grade silver camps in Nevada. And remember, Nevada was called the Silver State.

So what we went in, is we tripled the land position over the last year. Because when we went and sampled the surface, we found this new structure that was six or 700 meters long. And you know, some of the high grade rock sampling across the structure came up to about one and a half kilos of silver. But the real interesting part of Eliza is the high grade copper, up to 8% copper sitting at surface, eight, nine, 10%, 15% zinc, and 10 to 11% lead.

So are we sitting on top of an old silver mine that had very high grade that's never been touched, below the 100 and some foot level? Or are we sitting on top of a silver polymetallic story? Or are we sitting on top of a porphyry? So we don't know yet, but it is going to be an interesting project. Internally, we're very excited about drilling this Eliza project. We're about to do geophysics, do a flyover in about a month, get some extra layers of data, and we're going to drill this project at some point later in the summer, early fall. Very interesting. Lots of work, lots of new stuff coming out of that project.

And if we drive down the highway, again, in Nevada you got good access infrastructure, you drive down the highway and we run into what is called the Silverton Project. Which again, previous producers, old little shafts and adits sitting at surface. And this one's already permitted, ready to go, 13 tags. But again, I'd like to do a little bit of homework before we waste any of the shareholders' money on drillings. So we're going to do some geophysics, make some pretty colors with some EM and mag surveys, see what lines up, put all the layers together, punch some holes in. So if we look at the projects, Silverton would be first, Eliza would be the second project we would attack on the drill rig, and we'd hit Silver Strand at the end of the year.

Three busy programs, lots of new slope. But I always try to add at this point, this company, with the caliber of our team, Ron Burk, ex senior VP Silver Standard, I already mentioned Don Birak. Lawrence Roulston is an industry kind of newsletter analyst, technical guru. I mean, we're trying to build a producer. So on the sidelines we've got a couple of interesting acquisitions on the table. Because as soon as they saw Ron, and Don, and Lawrence, and maybe a little bit of me, we've got the team to put forward a production story. But in the meantime, until we find the right one, not any asset, we're going to drill these projects off and make the right acquisitions for our shareholders, and move forward. So yeah, it's going to be a good year for Silver Hammer.

Gerardo Del Real: Plenty of catalysts, obviously top-notch jurisdictions. You touched on the structure a bit. Where's the market cap right now?

Peter Ball: So the market cap is around, in Canadian dollars, about 13 to 15 million, currently about 46.7 million shares issued. You mentioned something about the financing at the beginning of this call, is we're going to do about 3 million. And when we're done the financing, we'll have sub 60 million shares out. Personally in the financing, I'm buying 10% personally. So I'm going to put a few hundred thousand dollars of my own money into the deal, to ensure that not only the new investors that are going to jump on board, but management is putting their money where their mouth is. Yeah, so we'll have sub 60 million, and we'll get at it and see what we can do for the shareholders, and put as much money as we can into the ground.

Gerardo Del Real: I love seeing management teams that eat their own cooking. You have the catalysts, you have multiple programs. It's going to be a fun 2023 I think in the precious metal space. And you teased a little M&A, so I'm looking forward to having you back on, Peter, and seeing how that develops as the year progresses. Thank you so much for your time today.

Peter Ball: Beautiful. Thanks again. And I appreciate you and your group following our story. And again, what I also say is, reach out to the website, my cell phone's on the website, my email. I will answer any call to anyone. If you have to do your due diligence, just give me a call. Within an hour I'll get back to you if I'm not sleeping on a plane.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. That email, everyone, is peter@silverhammermining.com, the website of course, silverhammermining.com. Peter Ball, everyone. Thank you so much, sir.

Peter Ball: Thank you very much. Have a good day.