# Small Placer Mining Operation in Arizona



## Socorro (Sep 28, 2012)

I was searching for information from folks in the small mining industry and ran across your forum. Looks to be a great forum with a lot of great people with a lot of knowledge in many different areas.

As a short introduction of myself, I'm running both placer and hard rock mining operations in a very small operation currently. I have been trying to find as much information as I can regarding flotation and ran across a posting by renatomerino http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=13729 here on the forum and thought I would add what I'm currently doing and what I hope to do in the coming weeks and months. Looks like I have my work cut out to reach the success level that renatomerino has accomplished. 8)

I've been running hard rock mining for a while now, using gravity seperation methods. I am running a 4' x 6' conical ball mill with a Falcon/Sepro Icon Seperator SB150 and a Neffco bowl. From those concentrates I run it through an Action mining micron wave table for final concentration and then smelt the super-cons.

I just recently purchased a Denver 18 special 4-cell flotation tanks which I am hoping to implement into the milling circuit, since about 45% of the gold is in the gold-bearing pyrite ore. The biggest challenge to gold recovery in the ore I'm running is that is mostly averages around 250-325 mesh. Because of the size, it pushes the boundaries of gravity seperation. I know flotation is the key to high gold recovery in my situation, but obtaining hands-on knowledge of actual implentation is very hard to come by, although it seems renatomerino is doing pretty good.  

As I hopefully will figure out the flotation, I’ll keep updates to my progress and hopefully will provide someone else in my same situation the tools and knowledge to accomplish their gold extraction as well.

Anyways, I’ve included a couple of video links of some of the operations currently doing, not great videos but just a quick video shot of collects pieces on my cell phone over the past months. Tried using the youtube link, but finally gave up and just gave links, hopefully I'll figure it out later.


http://youtu.be/bAK1oFcPdlE
http://youtu.be/2BVGQzys0zg
http://youtu.be/FLLkCvhYR2U
http://youtu.be/xH6SiMgdqZY


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## butcher (Sep 28, 2012)

welcome to the forum, I will watch the videos latter, It would be nice to see your sulfide floatation cell as it progresses.


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## bswartzwelder (Sep 29, 2012)

I like the ball mill, although it might be just a tad too noisy for my neighborhood. Cannot watch the fourth video without a password. Nice op0eration.


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## shaftsinkerawc (Sep 29, 2012)

I only got to watch the first 2 video's but am confused as to what you are crushing in the first. You appear to be running raw gravel and that looks like what is coming off the conveyor. 2nd video appears to be a finer crush but video is farther away and I can't tell. 3rd video took to long and 4th said it was private.


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