Has any one used a miniclone

[justinhcase]

I was looking around for a gravity separation system.
I had considered the normal gold sluices,blue bowle and spirals.
But the one's that seemed to be particularly good at concentrating the very fine Au that one is lightly to produce when incinerating and crushing Gold that is already very fine,where small and very labor intensive.the larger unit's that can run a larger amount of material all seemed to loos the finer particles.So it was looking like I would need quite a long unit with a good meany individual traps of varying types in order to get a good recovery.
Finally I found this which looks quite promising, http://www.hydrocyclone.com/products/miniclone.htm
Has any one used this unit or similar.Obviously it would mean coming up with a slurry system and a high pressure pump but from what I can see it might pay off.

 

[METLMASHER]

No.

Not for that anyway, I was using hydro-cyclones for separation of silicon carbide grits, ranging from about 600 grit to over 1200 grit.

The process involved a bank of pre-wash hydros, then a filter press, for lighter wastes, the flow stream went on to recover glycol.

On the dry side, however, the recoverable silicon carbide ( wet slurry) went on to a secondary bank of hydros, and down the line to driers. This secondary bank of hydros was my area, and they worked very well, most of the time.

We are talking about micron SiC sizes, but they scale perfectly from miniscule, to hunks. The only changes are angle, and flow.

Sometimes they would clog, due to an oversize chip build-up, but generally a check once in a while throughout the 12 hour shift, was enough to keep them moving well.

The use is becoming popular in gold mining for the difficult size fines and are worth further investigation. I know I asked about anyone using them a few years back, but had no confirmation.

I think if a man was to build, instead of buying them, that man will save thousands of dollars, but has a trial and error phase to deal with. A notebook full of results later, you'll be an expert at them.

They are a simple machine with a great potential, and easy to make.

 

[justinhcase]

Very interesting thank you METLMASHER.
If one was to try to manufacture for your self I am thinking a C.N.C. lathe would be the best way to go.
That way you could produce a number of variations easily to test.Tungsten particles would be a good test medium to save money until you where confident enough to run Au.
CSI use a quite advanced form of computer modeling to fine tune there unit's which I have not seen available.
Yet an other project to put on the list.

 

[etack]

If they are crushed and incinerated why not just melt them and save the time and mess? Seems like you could build a melting furnace a lot cheaper than some of the panning machines.

Eric

 

[justinhcase]

I know the larger particles of Au are best tackled by traditional methods.
But all the sources of that material is fought over continually.
The thing that attracts me towards the recovery of finer material is that it is quite hard which is a puzzle in it self. if you came up with a workable method there would be a very large amount of potential material to run.rerunning other peoples left over's for what has been missed may become profitable.
I have a very large amount of very finely divided Au locally that is impossible to extract economically at the moment.
View attachment crediton.pdf
View attachment crediton part2.pdf
By the buy I believe the Crediton concentration is linked some how to a historic occurrence near by at a place called Hope's Nose.
Quite a puzzle and hard to resist.
View attachment Hope's nose.pdf