Litharge Questions for Canadians

[Heavy-Black-Sand]

Before you invest money in eco-goldex, study what has been written about it here on the forum. You would be better advised to use potassium or sodium ferri- or ferro- cyanide.

Dav

It never mattered when I stripped plated parts but you could possibly take advantage of the tumbling action and add a few steel crusher balls which may effectively crush and leach at the same time. The drums are pretty tough and adding a lifter bar plastic welded into the drum will lift and drop the balls on the charge. And plastic drums are cheap enough to replace when they wear thin.

I don’t know if using the rotating plastic drum would abrade the varnish you mention but it may be just enough to avoid a separate ball mill step.

Some examples of the varnished like pieces .....

 

[Heavy-Black-Sand]

Some examples of the varnished like pieces .....

With smelting, generally speaking, i don't need to grind .... as prior testing has shown that, generally speaking; meeting a minimum gold concentration ratio, with the right fluxes, and workflow, produces metallic buttons with no metal in the slag (achieved clear glass-like slag) that can go straight to cupellation after the slag is removed from the metallic buttons .... plus, propane is easy to obtain, relatively inexpensive, and gets up to temp quickly ... that's my current thinking.

 

[Heavy-Black-Sand]

With smelting, generally speaking, i don't need to grind .... as prior testing has shown that, generally speaking; meeting a minimum gold concentration ratio, with the right fluxes, and workflow, produces metallic buttons with no metal in the slag (achieved clear glass-like slag) that can go straight to cupellation after the slag is removed from the metallic buttons .... plus, propane is easy to obtain, relatively inexpensive, and gets up to temp quickly ... that's my current thinking.

Also ... i don't plan on smelting "all" the black sand ... planning to do high grade cuts out of the black sand ... and smelt the highest & higher grade cuts of the black sand ... the left-over black sand that doesn't make the smelting cuts could possible go to leach if it's economic to do so.

 

[Darkthirty]

With smelting, generally speaking, i don't need to grind .... as prior testing has shown that, generally speaking; meeting a minimum gold concentration ratio, with the right fluxes, and workflow, produces metallic buttons with no metal in the slag (achieved clear glass-like slag) that can go straight to cupellation after the slag is removed from the metallic buttons .... plus, propane is easy to obtain, relatively inexpensive, and gets up to temp quickly ... that's my current thinking.

This guy does mercury / gold. Cleans the gold with comet and a vibrating cleaner, says a tumbler will work

 

[Heavy-Black-Sand]

This guy does mercury / gold. Cleans the gold with comet and a vibrating cleaner, says a tumbler will work

Thanks for the info ... some good tips there ... but my fine gold clean up sluices outperform mercury ... for example, the following pict shows fines pulled out of aprox. 50 lbs of black sand sluice box concentrates ... these fines were recovered in the fine gold sluice in under an hour ... as you can see from the pict, there's minimal black sand in the riffles ... loss rates off the end of the sluice mat for the high purity gold pieces are minimal ... once you go the Mercury route, you are adding in many extra steps, and alot of extra time.

When you can sluice out the vast, vast majority of black sand from the fines, it's pretty easy/quick to just then pan out the small amount of remaining black sand from the fines using some fine gold panning techniques.

The reason i'm looking at litharge/smelting is for targeting the low purity gold pieces, the encapsulated gold, and the pgm/gold/base metal particles, all of which aren't as easily recovered by gravity methods as the high purity gold pieces.