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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Friday was a rousing 82-55-125. The TSX Venture Exchange gained four points to 797 while polished diamond prices were flat. Eric Friedland and Tom Peregoodoff's Peregrine Diamonds Ltd. (PGD) lost one-half cent to 20.5 cents on 122,000 shares. The stock got as high as 26 cents last week, but the company's silence is strangling its momentum.

Dean Taylor's Diamcor Mining Inc. (DMI), down one cent to $1.04 on 10,000 shares, has completed a significant upgrade to its facilities at its Krone-Endora at Venetia project in South Africa. Mr. Taylor, president and chief executive officer, says that the installation of new equipment and the expansion of other facilities that began in the fall were completed by the end of the year and the final testing and calibration checks were successfully completed over the past few weeks.

The upgrades to Krone-Endora are designed to boost the amount of material the company can process, increase the size of the material that can be processed and improve the diamond recovery and sorting processes. Mr. Taylor now says that he expects Krone-Endora can double its processing volumes and recover larger diamonds, based on a 45-millimetre upper cut-off. Further, the Kelowna-based Mr. Taylor dangles the possibility of "yet additional capacity and operational efficiencies in the long term."

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