10X Gets Boots on Ground at Black Hammer

In 1972 two exploration crews walked hills three hours west of Sydney in lines 240 metres apart, stopping every 30 metres to scoop a bag of dirt for the lab.

They did that for two years. The lab tested for copper, lead, zinc and silver, and copper and zinc lit up along a 2.4 kilometre line with the metal still running at both ends when the crews packed up.

Nobody tested for gold. And two kilometres along the same line of rocks sit a pair of old gold mines that were worked by hand in the early 1900s.

Fifty years later, that whole strip is still waiting for its first drill hole.

Today Exultant Mining (ASX: 10X) put a field crew back on it. The company calls the target Watsons, and it sits inside Black Hammer, 10X’s 390 square kilometre project in the Macquarie Arc.

The Macquarie Arc is a strip of old volcanic country running up through the middle of NSW. It’s where Newmont dug Cadia, one of the biggest gold-copper mines on the planet at around 50 million ounces of gold and 9.5 million tonnes of copper, and where Evolution Mining pulls gold out of Cowal.

At 14 cents a share, 10X is a $5.5 million company with $3.5 million in the bank from the June quarterly, which leaves about a $2 million value on the 390 square kilometres.

Watsons is the first of three targets 10X picked from a list of 12.

We’ve been on the register since earlier this year. 10X’s other NSW project is Peak View, near Cooma down in the south of the state, and its maiden drilling there at a prospect called Balerion got six holes in during August.

While they wait on the three assays still at the lab, the crew has driven north to Black Hammer, the project we’ve been wanting to see them get into since day one.

10X, For Anyone Who Missed February

10X listed in December 2025 and we got in a couple of months later. It’s run out of Perth by executive chairman Brett Grosvenor, an engineer who has spent 25 years building big mining and power projects and getting them switched on.

The company has a tight capital structure at 37 million shares on issue, which means the price doesn’t need much volume to shift on the back of news.

Peak View is the high-grade one, with copper, lead, zinc, silver and gold packed into a compact zone of old volcanic rock and historical drilling that hit 22% zinc and 119 g/t silver in the same hole. Black Hammer is the big one by area. There’s gold ground in WA as well.

The Balerion core had sulphides in it, which is the first thing you want to see, and the assays for holes four, five and six are due in the coming weeks. That’s when we find out whether the old drilling grades hold up.

Black Hammer Time

The reason anyone cares about the hills around Oberon is what came out of them a century ago. Miners dug small workings across the ground in the early 1900s, and the records from the Tuglow Copper Mines show grades up to 14% copper, 26.4 g/t gold, 283 g/t silver and 13.1% zinc.

They dug what they could reach by hand and stopped. In the 100 years since, no one has put a drill hole under the workings to see what was left behind.

10X went through every report and map on the tenements and came up with 12 spots worth a look. It ranked them on how big each could be, and how cheaply it can be tested from surface before anyone pays for a rig.

Three came out on top.

Watsons

Watsons is where the 1972 crews found the copper and zinc in the dirt. The hottest patch is a block about 400 by 500 metres in the middle where copper, lead and zinc all ran high together, and the trend runs 2.4 kilometres with the anomaly open at both ends.

Copper-bearing quartz veins poke out of the ground along the trend. The Shooters Hill and Chatham Valley gold mines are two kilometres along strike.

10X has a land access agreement over most of the target and the crew is mapping and sampling now with a handheld XRF, a gun that reads metal content on the spot, so the hottest samples go to the lab first and are tested for gold.

Porters Retreat

Porters Retreat has gold sitting in the river that runs through it.

The Retreat River runs past an outcrop of monzonite. Monzonite is an intrusion, molten rock that pushed up through the crust and cooled where it sat, and the same type of intrusion fed Cadia.

The gold in the river is angular, meaning the pieces still have sharp edges and the water hasn’t carried them far, so the only obvious thing to have shed them is the intrusion they sit next to.

The intrusion has pyrite and chalcopyrite in it at surface. Chalcopyrite is the main copper mineral, so the copper is there to see before anyone digs. Lab work on rock samples 10X collected last year came back with the chemistry you see in the big low-grade copper-gold systems Cadia belongs to.

Magnetic surveys show anomalies beneath and beside the outcrop, which suggests the intrusion at surface is the top of a much larger body underground.

Vermithor

Vermithor started life in a filing cabinet.

10X went to the archive and ran a 1991 airborne magnetic survey through modern software, finding a circular anomaly about a kilometre across.

Modern software turns the old data into a 3D shape, and at Vermithor that shape runs roughly 1.2 kilometres deep.

At other deposits in the district, magnetic bullseyes like this have turned out to be the sulphide minerals that carry copper and gold. That’s how Vermithor made the list. Drilling is the only way to find out whether this one is.

The Footrot copper-gold prospect is within 5 kilometres. Nobody has sampled Vermithor, let alone drilled it.

The Metals 10X is Hunting

The last people to work this ground properly were the 1970s crews, and the metals in it are worth a great deal more now than they were then.

Copper is around US$6.60 a pound after setting an all-time high in early August. BHP was built on iron ore but now makes more money from copper.

The problem for BHP (and everyone its size) is that nobody is finding new copper. Of the roughly 400 million tonnes added to global copper resources since 2005, the vast majority came from extending mines that already existed.

Gold is around US$4,400 an ounce, off its January peak and still up close to 30% on the year. In the Macquarie Arc gold and copper come out of the same systems.

Zinc sits around US$3,850 a tonne, its highest since mid-2022 and up about 36% on a year ago, with the investment banks expecting mine supply to fall this year.

Why We Like the 10X Set Up

The order of events from here is Watsons fieldwork, then priority samples to the lab for gold and multi-element assays, then geophysics over whatever the surface work supports, then drill targets.

Porters Retreat and Vermithor follow as land access lands, with the Balerion assays arriving in the middle of it.

For a $5.5 million company that is a steady run of news over the next few months, and the $3.5 million in the bank pays for all of it without going back to the market.

10X is spending small money to rank big targets on a $2 million enterprise value, in a belt where copper and gold discoveries get bought. With 37 million shares on issue, there is very little stock around to absorb a good result.

If any one of the three delivers a drill result that matches the surface story, we like our chances of the market repricing 10X well beyond where it sits today.