TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – After successfully closing a C$3.13-million private placement in December, project developer Diamcor Mining has started expanding the mining facilities at its Krone-Endora at Venetia project, in South Africa’s Limpopo province, located directly next to De Beers’ Venetia diamond mine – the country’s largest precious gems mine.

TSX-V-listed Diamcor explained on Thursday that owing to the nature of the deposit, one of its main objectives was to design and develop the project's in-field dry-screening plant, necessary to efficiently remove fine material under 1 mm in size.

As a result of extensive testing and development, the in-field dry-screening plant now met company expectations and cleared the way to buy and deploy infrastructure necessary to process larger material in the +26 mm size fractions which, to date, had been stockpiled.

The Canadian junior noted that the upgrades were also designed to improve efficiencies when recovering all material sizes.

The infrastructure upgrades included expanding the project's X-ray final recovery systems, installing more processing equipment to boost crushing and ore liberation in the larger-size fractions and deploying larger heavy equipment.

Diamcor expected the expansion to be completed in the second calendar quarter this year.

Further, funding partner Tiffany & Co Canada had agreed to defer and extend all of the principal and interest payments on loans, effective from December 1. The outstanding balances would continue to accrue interest until payments of both principal and interest restarted in January 2016.

During Diamcor’s third financial quarter ended December 31, it continued to work on preparing an update of its initial National Instrument 43-101-compliant technical report.

The company planned to expand trial mining and processing of all material size fractions from deposits in the K1 area of the project, once it had updated its mineral resource estimate and had completed the current operation’s expansions. Information gleaned from these activities would be used to file further compliant technical reports and to assist the company in developing its operational strategy for the project.