High grade gold ore in difficult location.

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Thanks warmgold. Look at some of the placer nuggets I posted. They are not too big, but often times, are not weathered, they look still like crystalline, so that makes me think one or more big, big veins, are close. I have found some smaller veins, maybe that's all there is, but I have to think there is a big one out there, because some nuggets are large. I hope the metal detectors will help me in the exploring. The thing is that that time spent exploring is time not spent mining, and time is a very limited resource!. There's much more quartz than veins of gold, that's for sure.
 
My phone is a blackberry!. Those are zoom ins. I'll try next time around. I don't carry the nuggets with me.
 
"Table for cons from jig: https://www.911metallurgist.com/equipment/rp4-shaker-table/ . This uses a lot of water. It may not be practical, without some sort of deep well pump, in addition. Requires electricity too, another minus."

Looks like a good table to be used in your lab environment. But, in the "wild", I would have serious doubts about it's stability unless you're planning on pouring a concrete slab, or using bedrock, at your mining site. From it's propaganda (aka sales) sheet: "All RP4 shaker tables operate best when firmly secured to a dense solid mounting base. Wooden stands will set up harmonics and vibrations. Dense concrete or solid bedrock is preferred or a heavy braced steel table sitting on concrete."

I would really like to try this table with some incinerated and pulverized ICs! 8)

James
 
Thanks cosmetal. I have seen that. All tables seem to use a lot of water to clean up, compared to a jig. So really, at this point it looks that the solution will be to carry the concentrates out of the site, and only have the mill and the jig, powered by gas. I must really think more about this, since the concentrates are a lot less than the volume processed by the jig. So really the table, does not have to be running all the time, using water, but only between jig cleanups. A small electric plant is not out of the question. Yet I'm inclined to put the least amount of equipment in there.
 
cuchugold said:
Thanks warmgold. Look at some of the placer nuggets I posted. They are not too big, but often times, are not weathered, they look still like crystalline, so that makes me think one or more big, big veins, are close. I have found some smaller veins, maybe that's all there is, but I have to think there is a big one out there, because some nuggets are large. I hope the metal detectors will help me in the exploring. The thing is that that time spent exploring is time not spent mining, and time is a very limited resource!. There's much more quartz than veins of gold, that's for sure.


If you found some gold veins you are inside the gold spot and the bigger vein(s) can be near.
Look for iron stains on the rocks, on the quartz. Not every quartz vein in a gold spot area carring gold, usually gold is found inside the fractures of quartz veins, as an intrusion, compressed as a film and sometimes concentrated in nuggets
Look at the direction of the gold quartz vein and try to follow is path underground(remember that in millions of years the place is changed a lot)SOMETIMES it can leads to others veins

ANYWAY don't think it's easy job to dig in a quartz vein :twisted:

If you find a good spot for placer gold, work there, you will collect gold instantly instead of rock extraction...and a gold specimen on quartz usually is more valuable then the gold itself of the specimen
 
This is where the buck stops: To properly and efficiently mine a placer, the best or one of the best ways is to mine it all, basically with Hydraulicking (spelling?). This creates a massive footprint, makes a lot of noise and etc. Some spots are richer, others are poorer, and on average you get what you surveyed, give or take. You generally need a relatively large team, and a visible operation.

Now, if you mine a vein, and you only process the mineralized spots, you are 100% consistent. You know you are going to get X, after a certain amount of hours. So it is less noisy, less destructive, and more consistenly profitable (less risk).

Having said that, I'm not leaving behind any rich placer spots that I can detect. Yet the whole placer, at this point in time is an impossible task for me. The yield per Ton in the vein is consistently much higher than the average placer spots. So 1 Ton of vein material can be 5 or more times richer than an average 1 Ton of placer. Also to mine a prime placer spot, you may need to dig 3 or 4 times more material to move it out of the way.

The critical optimal path is maximizing the weight of gold in Oz mined per Ton of material physically moved by yours truly, or per unit of time.

I welcome the discussion and your opinions, as usual.
 
In regard to a suitable jig for running milled ore, you are looking at a twin hutch 12" end tyre jig for 1 ton per hour, the greater the jig area the less tonnage per area is put over the jig and the better the recovery of fine gold.

A 18" twin hutch jig is better than a 12" for 1 ton milled ore per hour

This is the simplest and more importantly the lightest jig for your project.

The screen should be 1/8" or preferably 3/32" punched stainless steel plate and the ragging should be at least 1" bed depth of the punchings from the screen, often run as 1 - 2" bed depth.

This is a lot of punchings to run through when looking for nuggets, that is why you put a simple sluice in the feed launder.

What you are looking for is a metal punching works which will sell you not only the screen but also the punchings which they usually sell as scrap to a recycler.

The punchings go oversize when punched and will not fit back in the punched holes.

Make sure that the screen is installed with the smooth side up, bed spacer plates are usually around 4" apart.

You are going to be running the jig as a primary recovery device so you want to get minimal losses from your feed.

This means setting the stroke length at 1" and the stroke rate at around 100 strokes per minute.

By using the stainless pellets you will minimise the quantity of cons produced by this primary jig.

Hutch water is supplied in quantities such that when the jig is operating you can put your hand flat on the top of the ragging and feel your hand being sucked down through the ragging. If you do not feel your hand being sucked down then you are running too much hutch water. If your hand is really ripped down then you do not have enough hutch water and despite using the stainless pellets you will get an excessive quantity of cons.

Feed water flow rate should be just enough to carry the coarsest ore particles over the jig bed when operating.

You will probably be moderately horrified at the amount of water needed to operate even this size jig, you will usually practice water recycling with the tailings being placed in a large hole and the clean water overflow recycled to the jig.

There are what seems like a million versions of tables available with a similar wide spread of performances.

For basic clean up you have difficulty going past a Wilfley, the small clean up units are usually frame mounted and are thus free standing, no bolting down required.

Slowly fed with cons from a jig, a Wilfley will give clean separation down to 10 micron gold particle sizes assuming that the original mill product is well sized, probably particle size all less than 150 microns.

Deano
 
Thanks again Deano!. I'm writing all these tips down.

Can you suggest manufacturers for gas-powered jigs and mills?. I could probably make them with time, since they are horribly overpriced, and electric, but I have less time these days.

It seems all the coarse from vein stays, turning to nuggets, in front of the the mill 1 mm screen output. Do you think a sluice is still needed for the < 1 mm jig feed ?. I can see its use for sure in an non screened placer feed, to avoid cleaning of the raggings, as you described. For now, I have decided to focus on the vein feed from the mill. I will sieve and pan the hand picked placer spots manually for nuggets, feeding the pan "tailings" in the mill, for a < 1mm feed to the jig all across.
 
im1badpup1 said:
Dig a pit a large one take lots of plastic tarpaulin lightweight sheets and catch rainfall when it comes directed to the pit. Dont forget to line the pit with tarp. Have it covered over to prevent evaporation and provide some stealth at least to its storage.
Have a second dry pit dug to store materials youve lugged up there or are using in.
Take a fresnel lens to heat water start fires melt bits of rock with. They easily reach 1300c and more. Thats celcius not farenheit. U can get one off front of a old tv check on youtube what u can do with one.
You could rig a primitive hammer mill up with the right pulley gearing system and a windmill. Or attach to back wheel of a bicycle and pedal it like an exercise bike.
Say like a timber A frame with something like a tree trunk on a rope suspended. A gear system to lighten the weight u have to pull it up and a slip so it drops sharply
A half ton trunk on its end would probably only need to drop a foot or so to crush fist size rocks to nothing.
I saw the fresnel in youtube. The hot spot is small, but it's hot enough to fluidize quartz. Any ideas how to melt larger quantities?. Maybe heat a graphite crucicle and see how much the heat propagates?. The primitive hammer mill idea looks good too. Like a giant mortar. It could take a while to crush 10 tons of rocks though. I can bring a small 80 cc gas motor on the site, or a small motorcycle, with some difficulty. I could use a basket of large rocks as the weight, instead of a wood trunk, with a piece of steel as the crushing contact surface.

I must admit that melting the rocks, silently and peacefully, and collecting the wages in a gold button, sounds to me like Nirvana. Maybe there is a way. I usually sleep during the day, and work the sieves/pan at night when it is cooler.
 
This guy has done something very close, in a small scale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svAPyyUJUCo

How can I make the fireball much bigger, and with a side discharge for the melted quartz?. (the gold will just drop to the bottom of the natural quartz made crucible):
1-Insulation.
2-More heat packed in (as in a wood/coal furnace surrounding).
3-More sun, more mirrors, more lenses.
4-Magic ideas?.
5-Other?.
6-A line of fireballs, with a feeding point at one end, and a discharge for the glass on the other?.

I think this line of thought can be pursued, and yield a solution, eventually. An elegant one cosmetal?. :) :G
 

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cuchugold said:
This guy has done something very close, in a small scale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svAPyyUJUCo

How can I make the fireball much bigger, and with a side discharge for the melted quartz?. (the gold will just drop to the bottom of the natural quartz made crucible):
1-Insulation.
2-More heat packed in (as in a wood/coal furnace surrounding).
3-More sun, more mirrors, more lenses.
4-Magic ideas?.
5-Other?.
6-A line of fireballs, with a feeding point at one end, and a discharge for the glass on the other?.

I think this line of thought can be pursued, and yield a solution, eventually. An elegant one cosmetal?. :) :G

Sexy? Yes. :D

Elegant? No. :(

Why? Time is money . . . too slow and also too unpredictable. Your mining location is in a rainforest, yes?

James
 
cosmetal said:
Why? Time is money . . . too slow and also too unpredictable. Your mining location is in a rainforest, yes?

James
There is plenty of sun, when it's not raining.

Parabolic vs fresnel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVFGJ_lZtoQ

A lot of experimenting will be necessary, I think. Tightly insulated, coal furnace, with a shallow quartz rock made crucible in the middle, and several mirror/ lenses focused on the top, with a discharge for glass on the side. At the end of the day, one hammers the crucible and retrieves the button/nugget/blob.

Any ideas?.

Maybe add a graphite rod in the middle to increase the heat downwards and melt more quartz. I'm just writing as I think. Have no shame to chime in, please. Brainstorming.
 
Personally I don't believe you can ever count on Mother nature co-operating. When you are operating in a situation where you have very defined windows to get tasks completed, I am a firm believer in bringing the tools and equipment with me to get the job done.

Last year I visited the colony settlement in Williamsburg Virginia where the original settlers came bent on manufacturing glass because they had all of the raw materials right where they needed them. So they brought in experienced glass makers and built the kiln and collected the raw materials and made glass. Trouble is they needed a consistent wind to get the temperature boost in their kiln for it to function properly. Bottom line was they failed, the wind let them down! OK the indians also scalped a few of them too....... kind of like what you're dealing with!

Solar power is great, when the sun shines! Years ago I made a solar oven with my son as a science fair project he wanted to do. We made an oven with a chamber with a size of about an 18" cube. Boy did that get hot! And we did cook a lot of food in it over the summer that followed. But here's the thing...... you're having a bunch of guests for Thanksgiving dinner and the plan is to cook the turkey in the solar oven. Maybe if you live in the desert where it's always sunny but just when you have a table full of guests counting on a nice turkey dinner you have an overcast day, you're SOL! The moral of the story, to me, is you can't count on Mother nature.

Maybe if this was a "normal" mining gig where it was more predictable a solar Fresnel lens could provide the answer. If you could wait for the right time when all of the stars are aligned to give you the conditions you need, but in your situation, sort of like a Dan Brown adventure suspense novel, I would need to be sure it can be done when I need it done in a process I can count on.
 
4metals said:
Solar power is great, when the sun shines! Years ago I made a solar oven with my son as a science fair project he wanted to do. We made an oven with a chamber with a size of about an 18" cube. Boy did that get hot!

Fair enough. You have fresnel / mirror / solar experience!. Let's solve the problem for the simplest case: 1-the sun is shining.

Those fresnels and mirrors, seem to heat the spot to level within minutes. It's not like the furnace needs time to warm up (but'it's already at 1100 C + because of the coal), so half way there. We only need another 700 C to reach 1800 C, and that quartz becomes like water, and the gold drops.

Let's focus on how it can be done, positive situation. Unless it works well in the shop, I'm not bringing it to the field.

The world changes fast, yesterday I did not know what a fresnel was...
 
A fresnel lens is impractical on any scale more than a few grams. But it would be a good benefit to a small furnace helping to add more heat quickly. I think it was mentioned at beginning of the thread there was an issue with getting a high enough temperature in a small furnace. The fresnel lens might just make all the difference. If your doing tens of kilos a time forget it.

The problem is about the power output of a fresnel. Itl only be half a kilowatt or so. All that energy is focused into a tiny area. Its why i thought it might be enough to push the temperature up in a small furnace to work for you but scaling up is impractical.
It might heat rocks or rock faces and weaken them to shatter when waters thrown on though? Ive no idea how effective it might be.
 
im1badpup1 said:
A fresnel lens is impractical on any scale more than a few grams. But it would be a good benefit to a small furnace helping to add more heat quickly. I think it was mentioned at beginning of the thread there was an issue with getting a high enough temperature in a small furnace. The fresnel lens might just make all the difference.
The guy in the video melts glass, without any other heat source, without insulation, with the glass bead on top of a piece of cooling iron,... without breaking a sweat.

He ignites (without knowing himself) Aluminum, making a lance torch that punches through the ceramic... without pure oxygen!.

10 Ton is a tall order, let's try for 10 Kg. If one can feed 10 Kg every few minutes, and discharge glass to one side, the gold will eventually overflow.
 
Backing off a little. This is what's on the table:

1-The conventional solution comprise of a gas powered mill and jig. (recommendations for a manufacturer or distributor of reliable equipment are welcomed). And transporting the cons off the mining site for further enrichment and smelting. With settings as per Deano's suggestions. Cyanidation of tailings unlikely. A test leach to determine how much is left behind.

2-Experiment with increasing the temperature of the coal fired cupola, using solar methods.

3-Exploring with metal detectors, both the placer, and the veins, and continuation of sieving/panning the placer by hand.

Please keep posting!.
 
4metals said:
Last year I visited the colony settlement in Williamsburg Virginia where the original settlers came bent on manufacturing glass because they had all of the raw materials right where they needed them. So they brought in experienced glass makers and built the kiln and collected the raw materials and made glass. Trouble is they needed a consistent wind to get the temperature boost in their kiln for it to function properly. Bottom line was they failed, the wind let them down! OK the indians also scalped a few of them too....... kind of like what you're dealing with!

Dunno what you source of this info is, but it's wrong. The first glass making operation in 1608 failed because 1) starvation hit the colony, and 2) tobacco proved more lucrative for the Virginia Company, so much so, that they brought over the first slaves to farm the tobacco, and abandoned the glass making effort. Shipping tobacco back to England made more money than did glass, a product already made in England.

There was a second glass making effort in 1619 at the same site - and it would have been a success, if not for an Indian uprising, lack of better sand, and the destruction of the glasshouse - it BLEW down. :shock:

"The Italians proved difficult for the English to work with, and there were other difficulties. First the glasshouse blew down and then the Indian uprising of 1622 put a stop to everything for the time being. Finally, Captain Norton died, and the Italians "fell extremely sick." George Sandys, resident treasurer for the Company, took over the project upon Norton's death, but fared little better in getting results. He repaired the furnace and the crew set to work in earnest in the spring of 1623, but without success."

https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/glassmaking-at-jamestown.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_glassmaking_in_the_United_States

According to the University of VA, no glass making effort was present in Virginia after 1624, until 2006, one year before the 400th anniversary of Jamestown - and never in Williamsburg. I've got 2006 and 2007 green glass commemorative "blobs" or paper weights, made at the new Jamestown site. Even now, some of the raw materials are present, but not used, as it's labor intensive to use them.
 
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