One trick, before you stop stratifying, significantly reduce the side to side force and come to a stop very gradually. The gentler motions don't catch the smaller particles in turbulence while still letting them settle.
It seems every placer deposit has some gold dust that just doesn't want to settle out as quickly as the more easily seen small flakes. So, how does the small miner justify the time and effort needed to capture it? I remember reading that it takes 40,000 gold dust particles to add up to an ounce. That's a lot of labor-intensive panning. You can readily see why miners are commonly looking for options other than the toxic ones that are readily available such as mercury, fat flotation, expensive acid and cyanide. Keith, you have proven to be quite handy in constructing mining equipment in the past, so please build an "automatic" processor that deals with both the fine clay particles and these fine gold dust particles, then sell me one. Thanks for posting this common mining issue video.
I was told that -300 mesh and smaller will 'not' come out of (water slurry) suspension in any type of sluice with riffles, in other words it can 'not' be caught in a sluicing system. But it 'can' be caught in a jig, centrifuge, or vibrating table system.
That seems to match my experience. I can recover down to 500 mesh in an ocscillating Jig. 2000 mesh won't even settle in still water- that's what we are working on leaching now.
Great instruction!. I have just started to pan for gold here in my home land Sweden. I have just taken a couple of samples(42 Lbs/19 Kg in my backpack) from a construction site a kilometre from my home where they have dug up the earth all the way down to blue clay and sea bottom with a lot of red sand. The sand is mainly quartz and i just want to take a look at it out of curiosity. Cheers 🙂
Remember that larger gold will not act in the same way as micro fine gold. When testing a new material always use both types of reveal: my tapping method AND the swirl type reveal that works for the larger gold. It changes at about 50 mesh which id about the size of table salt.
There is a Gold sol in a British museum that has not settled since the 18th Century. I used to make them as a hobby and found that the cleaner the water, the longer it takes for the Gold to settle. When the particles are very fine, electrostatic forces come into play and the Gold particles, having the same charge repel each other.
Once it gets small enough it won't settle for sure. A lot of gold in hard rock IS that small. Thus the hybrid system{ gravity separation for the (relatively speaking) big stuff and dissolution for the small stuff.
@@hardrockuniversity7283 In commecial production the fines from the Ball mill go thrugh a gravity separation process and only the fines go to the cyanide dissalution process. t's pointless to send large bits due to the time it would take to put them in solution.
@@hardrockuniversity7283 The Gold isn't going anywhere. It just needs to be cleaned-out periodically. The super in charge knows when. It's the down-time that makes management ansy.
Thanks for additional info concerning ultrafine gold recovery ... Sometimes a guy forgets things ( if he ever knew them to start with ) Ultrafine gold is what I get every day . I get gold here in Eastern Washington out of the Snake River that is said to have originated in Northwest Wyoming ... Crazy fine
Was there much black sand in that sample Keith , i know the fine stuff settles pretty quick , but if you got a fair bit of black sand it takes a bit to get it right to the bottom , interesting experiment though .cheers .
Very little heavies. Mostly tramp iron from the grinding. However, even a couple of percent heavies seems to make little difference. In solid heavies, the gold still seems to drop reasonably easily as ling as it's not flaky.
im looking at river gravels in southern michigan and my -70 material always has tons of very shiny/flakey material that wont settle but loves to roll around and flicker both on top of the settled material in the pan and in suspension. when i slowly decant water off the top of material in my pan after agitating it a few times i see the shiny shimmer of flakes float out of the pan in the water. i havent looked at under microscope but im wondering if this is micro gold or some other flaky mineral that is shiny, such as muscovite? cant seem to find any videos online showing what i am seeing in my pans. of course being in michigan, any gold is the very fine stuff ground up by glaciers and outwash rivers, traveling hundreds of miles from canada.
It is probably muscovite. You can test it witheither aqua regia (gold will dissolve) or mercury (gold will stick). If you can isolate a decent size flake, you can press on it and see if it breaks up (muscovite) or gets larger (ma;;eab;e gold).
It is all ore dependent. First you would try a gravity separation is it is the easiest by far- IF IT WORKS. Then you would go to leaching. If you have sulfides you would almost certainly have to throw a roast in there between crushing and extraction. One always starts out with a serious sampling program and laboratory scale testing of the options BEFORE making any decisions or buying equipment.
@@hardrockuniversity7283 I have it as separated as it can generally get and semi concentrated, by the nature of this material it's a high concentration level. I wish I could post a video here for you if there's a way of doing it, let me know. I have three labs picked out for the assays which ones going to conduct two different test for me and I'm gonna compare which ones the most effective and cost effective for me when it's all said and done. I just after that don't know if I wanna go straight to refiner or bring a processor is a middleman and that's the purpose of that caustic soda question I mentioned if it's going to help me toward my end goal but if you have that process, you mentioned, please list it in terms of the lab in the other stuff you mentioned yes I got that pretty much dialed. In the fact I could probably bring this in now and I'll accept it the way it is with the smile on their face, but I wanna make them smile even further I want them to give me a better deal because I wanna make their life easier and I want to bring them enough material each week where they're happy as hell. I'm not a processor. It's kind of fun but I don't wanna get into it. I want to stay away from me wearing the refiner hat as well. I'm a rainmaker in mining, I find good gold, good buyers, good land and mineral resources, investors, and set up arrangements and turn around and do it over and over again, but this time I'm doing something a little bit different. It's hands-on only through the next step thus the purpose of my public question on one of these threads
I am pretty confident it would be even faster. I was surprised at how fast it was in those conditions. Common sense would seem to indicate it would move quite slowly, but not so much.
@@hardrockuniversity7283 - ever tried panning with some flocculant in the water instead of jet dry? I wonder if it would push sub 300-500 mesh gold to to the bottom, just like the other sediments.
What would you say would be the ounces per ton if the amount of gold in the 3rd pan was from hard rock crush that was not concentrates, with every crush consistantly . Just the crushed Rick as is ? Ruffly your best gusse ?
With a standard size sample, better than an ounce per ton. Probably 1.5 to 2 ounces per ton. If that was rock, it would be ore unless it was only an inch or two across.
That is exactly what happened here. Quick panning and then double panning the tailings will tell the tale for your ore. We have an ore up here where the gold is 80% passing 2300 mesh. Would not work for that.
I can see how tough it is for ultra fines to drop, when there is so much going on in a pan! Would smaller con amounts in the pan (even though its more work) make it easier for ultras to sink quicker? (With less material to fight?)
The problem is that when cleaning out the PAN after panning high grade cons, I can easily leave some gold behind that then shows up in the next test. If the cons are running 20 ounces per ton and I miss only 1% of the gold in the pan when I clean it, the next sample would look like .2 Oz/T even if it had nothing in it. That is why I started using different pans for cons versus ore. Not a silly question.
I think its just econ 101. Until the price of gold goes up and the cost of extraction cross paths to a line of profit all you can do with this type of gold as a hobbyist; is just concentrate it down as cheap and fast as possible, then just wait. I would probably just run all that paydirt through gold cube or jig, then rinse the tailings through a 100micron mesh screen or smaller and you will end up with like a tablespoon of "clay" per 5 gal bucket of paydirt. After 20 years you might have half a bucket of clay that might warrant the cost of refinement.
One trick, before you stop stratifying, significantly reduce the side to side force and come to a stop very gradually. The gentler motions don't catch the smaller particles in turbulence while still letting them settle.
Interesting. I will try to remember to give it a go tomorrow.
I love the super microfine education.
Glad to help.
Keith, Good work sir! Always enjoy your straight forward testing that is field ready!
Thanks
✌️PT
The double barrel is doing well...
Thnks sir for the better idea how to catch super fine gold easily and the sharing better most information to do it have a nice day sir god bless u.
You are most welcome.
Thank you for answering a question that has been on my mind for a while. Just subscribed
You're welcome
It seems every placer deposit has some gold dust that just doesn't want to settle out as quickly as the more easily seen small flakes. So, how does the small miner justify the time and effort needed to capture it? I remember reading that it takes 40,000 gold dust particles to add up to an ounce. That's a lot of labor-intensive panning. You can readily see why miners are commonly looking for options other than the toxic ones that are readily available such as mercury, fat flotation, expensive acid and cyanide. Keith, you have proven to be quite handy in constructing mining equipment in the past, so please build an "automatic" processor that deals with both the fine clay particles and these fine gold dust particles, then sell me one. Thanks for posting this common mining issue video.
It makes a big difference when you have an ounce or more of Gold in suspension.
I was told that -300 mesh and smaller will 'not' come out of (water slurry) suspension in any type of sluice with riffles, in other words it can 'not' be caught in a sluicing system. But it 'can' be caught in a jig, centrifuge, or vibrating table system.
That seems to match my experience. I can recover down to 500 mesh in an ocscillating Jig. 2000 mesh won't even settle in still water- that's what we are working on leaching now.
Great instruction!. I have just started to pan for gold here in my home land Sweden.
I have just taken a couple of samples(42 Lbs/19 Kg in my backpack) from a construction site a kilometre from my home where they have dug up the earth all the way down to blue clay and sea bottom with a lot of red sand. The sand is mainly quartz and i just want to take a look at it out of curiosity.
Cheers 🙂
Remember that larger gold will not act in the same way as micro fine gold. When testing a new material always use both types of reveal: my tapping method AND the swirl type reveal that works for the larger gold. It changes at about 50 mesh which id about the size of table salt.
There is a Gold sol in a British museum that has not settled since the 18th Century. I used to make them as a hobby and found that the cleaner the water, the longer it takes for the Gold to settle. When the particles are very fine, electrostatic forces come into play and the Gold particles, having the same charge repel each other.
Once it gets small enough it won't settle for sure. A lot of gold in hard rock IS that small. Thus the hybrid system{ gravity separation for the (relatively speaking) big stuff and dissolution for the small stuff.
@@hardrockuniversity7283
In commecial production the fines from the Ball mill go thrugh a gravity separation process and only the fines go to the cyanide dissalution process. t's pointless to send large bits due to the time it would take to put them in solution.
@@cooljets Correct. Unfortunately, end discharge ball mills also tend to be good gold traps.
@@hardrockuniversity7283
The Gold isn't going anywhere. It just needs to be cleaned-out periodically. The super in charge knows when. It's the down-time that makes management ansy.
Loren said the mine he used to work at used the gold in the ball mills an an emergency piggy bank. 🙂
Thanks for additional info concerning ultrafine gold recovery ... Sometimes a guy forgets things ( if he ever knew them to start with )
Ultrafine gold is what I get every day .
I get gold here in Eastern Washington out of the Snake River that is said to have originated in Northwest Wyoming ... Crazy fine
I have heard of Snake River powder.
Lotsa 200-300 mesh gold
@@frankbyrd6726 So I've heard.
Was there much black sand in that sample Keith , i know the fine stuff settles pretty quick , but if you got a fair bit of black sand it takes a bit to get it right to the bottom , interesting experiment though .cheers .
Very little heavies. Mostly tramp iron from the grinding. However, even a couple of percent heavies seems to make little difference. In solid heavies, the gold still seems to drop reasonably easily as ling as it's not flaky.
im looking at river gravels in southern michigan and my -70 material always has tons of very shiny/flakey material that wont settle but loves to roll around and flicker both on top of the settled material in the pan and in suspension. when i slowly decant water off the top of material in my pan after agitating it a few times i see the shiny shimmer of flakes float out of the pan in the water. i havent looked at under microscope but im wondering if this is micro gold or some other flaky mineral that is shiny, such as muscovite? cant seem to find any videos online showing what i am seeing in my pans. of course being in michigan, any gold is the very fine stuff ground up by glaciers and outwash rivers, traveling hundreds of miles from canada.
It is probably muscovite. You can test it witheither aqua regia (gold will dissolve) or mercury (gold will stick). If you can isolate a decent size flake, you can press on it and see if it breaks up (muscovite) or gets larger (ma;;eab;e gold).
What about boiling out the silica and quartz with sodium hydroxide, letting it cool then panning out the gold?
Too expensive and too much hazardous waste for practicality. there are much cheaper and safer methods. It would probably work though.
Thank you. What would be a better plan of action in processing in your personal opinion. I'm learning from you
It is all ore dependent. First you would try a gravity separation is it is the easiest by far- IF IT WORKS. Then you would go to leaching. If you have sulfides you would almost certainly have to throw a roast in there between crushing and extraction.
One always starts out with a serious sampling program and laboratory scale testing of the options BEFORE making any decisions or buying equipment.
@@hardrockuniversity7283 I have it as separated as it can generally get and semi concentrated, by the nature of this material it's a high concentration level. I wish I could post a video here for you if there's a way of doing it, let me know. I have three labs picked out for the assays which ones going to conduct two different test for me and I'm gonna compare which ones the most effective and cost effective for me when it's all said and done. I just after that don't know if I wanna go straight to refiner or bring a processor is a middleman and that's the purpose of that caustic soda question I mentioned if it's going to help me toward my end goal but if you have that process, you mentioned, please list it in terms of the lab in the other stuff you mentioned yes I got that pretty much dialed. In the fact I could probably bring this in now and I'll accept it the way it is with the smile on their face, but I wanna make them smile even further I want them to give me a better deal because I wanna make their life easier and I want to bring them enough material each week where they're happy as hell. I'm not a processor. It's kind of fun but I don't wanna get into it. I want to stay away from me wearing the refiner hat as well. I'm a rainmaker in mining, I find good gold, good buyers, good land and mineral resources, investors, and set up arrangements and turn around and do it over and over again, but this time I'm doing something a little bit different. It's hands-on only through the next step thus the purpose of my public question on one of these threads
Luv your channel Keith ❤️
Thank you
I appreciate your great works.
Thank you
I wonder how saturation plays a roll. How would a bigger pan and more clear water effect the sample if there was more water to mix with the sludge.
I am pretty confident it would be even faster. I was surprised at how fast it was in those conditions. Common sense would seem to indicate it would move quite slowly, but not so much.
@@hardrockuniversity7283 - ever tried panning with some flocculant in the water instead of jet dry? I wonder if it would push sub 300-500 mesh gold to to the bottom, just like the other sediments.
@@danhodgins4015 I have used flocculant at times to settle the slimes in a process, but never tested it against gold itself. Might work.
What would you say would be the ounces per ton if the amount of gold in the 3rd pan was from hard rock crush that was not concentrates, with every crush consistantly . Just the crushed Rick as is ? Ruffly your best gusse ?
With a standard size sample, better than an ounce per ton. Probably 1.5 to 2 ounces per ton. If that was rock, it would be ore unless it was only an inch or two across.
Does gold really settle that fast and you're not losing any?
That is exactly what happened here. Quick panning and then double panning the tailings will tell the tale for your ore. We have an ore up here where the gold is 80% passing 2300 mesh. Would not work for that.
I can see how tough it is for ultra fines to drop, when there is so much going on in a pan! Would smaller con amounts in the pan (even though its more work) make it easier for ultras to sink quicker? (With less material to fight?)
Less than 15 seconds seems fine to me. To answer the other question, the thinner the pulp, the faster the trip to the bottom.
I don’t understand the term contamination ? It’s all from the same test cup so I don’t understand what ya mean ,hope this isn’t a silly question
The problem is that when cleaning out the PAN after panning high grade cons, I can easily leave some gold behind that then shows up in the next test. If the cons are running 20 ounces per ton and I miss only 1% of the gold in the pan when I clean it, the next sample would look like .2 Oz/T even if it had nothing in it. That is why I started using different pans for cons versus ore.
Not a silly question.
@@hardrockuniversity7283 oh ok thank you so much for explaining this….
@@juliesilva6760 You're welcome.
I also found some that look like micro sand in grey colour, is it gold
Must be pyrite
nice Thnks for the information sir.
You are most welcome
I think thier some super super fine gold will out with water
I think its just econ 101. Until the price of gold goes up and the cost of extraction cross paths to a line of profit all you can do with this type of gold as a hobbyist; is just concentrate it down as cheap and fast as possible, then just wait. I would probably just run all that paydirt through gold cube or jig, then rinse the tailings through a 100micron mesh screen or smaller and you will end up with like a tablespoon of "clay" per 5 gal bucket of paydirt. After 20 years you might have half a bucket of clay that might warrant the cost of refinement.
You always have to follow the numbers
AHHHHH!!!!!!! THATS MY AREAS STUFF!!!!! IT DRIVES ME NUTS PANNING IT... it I enjoy it. Kinda like pick your own torture
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