Nube here with a question ?

[motohed]

Hi all , I recently joined the site and want to find some Gold . I'm not looking to get rich , but I like machines , so I'm looking for a spiral wheel or a gold table . I want something light and portable that won't break the bank , so under five hundred . I'm looking for pros and cons of each and which one does the best with fine gold . Thank in advance , Scott .

 

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[arizau]

Hi all , I recently joined the site and want to find some Gold . I'm not looking to get rich , but I like machines , so I'm looking for a spiral wheel or a gold table . I want something light and portable that won't break the bank , so under five hundred . I'm looking for pros and cons of each and which one does the best with fine gold . Thank in advance , Scott .

Are you talking about a primary recovery system for field use? Neither are for that purpose and are used in gold concentrate cleanup efforts. There are many plans/suggestions on this site and on the web as to how to make a miller table (a type of gold table) on the cheap and, when properly set up and used, they are very effective in recovering the finest of gold particles.

Spend your money on gold concentrating equipment and accessories (depending on your actual needs!) such as a highbanker, dredge, a sluice(s), classifying screens, pans, etc. The first two of these are the high dollar items and you probably don't even want to consider buying one of them until you are more into prospecting. I would choose a good sluice as my first real investment along with pans, etc. and you can get all of this for well under $500. Actually it is best to start out with just the basic pan(s) and classifiers then advance from there.

Good luck and welcome to the forum.

 

[Terry Soloman]

The first thing you need to do is join a club. Google or Bing clubs in Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut, and let them TEACH you what you need to seperate and concentrate - then recover the fine gold in your area. Producing claims are going to be rare and coveted.

 

[goldenIrishman]

I too say join a club. Very good way to learn the basics and get some experience under your belt.

One thing that way to many new people do is go out and spend tons of money getting gear before they even know where they're going to be prospecting. This a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. You need to learn the ground you'll be working and let it dictate what equipment you need to get the gold. Go this route and you'll save yourself a lot of money and frustration.

 

[Lanny in AB]

As others have said, the items you're suggesting are more for concentrating, though some people do use a gold wheel by a stream if the material is already classified down to finer status so the wheel will handle it, but it's slow work.

A better option for a beginner, I believe, is to first learn to use a gold pan. Why? The pan has been used for a long, long time to test to see if there's even any gold worth recovering. A gold pan will quickly tell you how many pieces of gold are in a pan of dirt. Once you learn that valuable information, you can up-gun to a stream sluice or a high-banker. I always test with a pan before I go bigger, and when I find a sweet spot with a pan, I always go bigger in a hurry as I can process far more material in a far shorter amount of time.

So, I'd get on youtube, watch some of the good panning videos that are on their site and learn how to pan. Seriously, I'd learn how to pan and get very good at it before I did anything else. Next, I'd sample some of your local streams with a pan to find a hot spot, then keep the knowledge to yourself and go get a stream sluice or a high-banker (if your regs allow it). In other words, save your money until you've learned to test with a pan, then find a deposit that warrants spending some money, then buy a piece of equipment and go get some gold.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[motohed]

Thanks to all , I guess I should have put nube to a good clean up system , I have done a little prospecting over the last 40 years , in the early time my parents owned a rock shop and did some gold prospecting , I own several bussinesses at this point , excavation , logging and a campground in RI . I own most of the tools for prospecting tools , etc from my lapidary days . I have pans , classifiers , snifters , hand dredge , sluicing equipment , and all the hand tools necessary for finding gold by hand . I have a place near Littleton , NH . I will be spending about 8 months up there except for some bussiness travel to make sure every thing runs smooth . I will basically be up there all the time , except when I go home to see the wife . I have found some color , and I definetly need a lot of guidence from all here in the forum . I just feel like I'm missing some of the gold when panning , so I tend to hold on to my consentraites that are in question . Thanks again Scott

 

[arizau]

Now that that is clarified, concentrate on volume and concentration. A highbanker, or some type of properly set up sluice will do that. Most people on this forum swear by a bazooka gold trap sluice since with sufficient water flow you can run all day with no additional effort for pre-classifying feed material. Other sluice types are better for low flow situations but require some level of classification of the feed material.

The main key to separating out even the finest of gold from your concentrates is to classify all your concentrates to like sizes that are about half the size of the size above (fine gold is usually deemed to be 30 mesh or less so a 30. 50 and 100 mesh screen will do the job). At that point panning each size separately is usually sufficient in gold recovery. You could use the equipment you mentioned but still do the classification steps to maximize recovery.

Good luck

 

[Lanny in AB]

Thanks to all , I guess I should have put nube to a good clean up system , I have done a little prospecting over the last 40 years , in the early time my parents owned a rock shop and did some gold prospecting , I own several bussinesses at this point , excavation , logging and a campground in RI . I own most of the tools for prospecting tools , etc from my lapidary days . I have pans , classifiers , snifters , hand dredge , sluicing equipment , and all the hand tools necessary for finding gold by hand . I have a place near Littleton , NH . I will be spending about 8 months up there except for some bussiness travel to make sure every thing runs smooth . I will basically be up there all the time , except when I go home to see the wife . I have found some color , and I definetly need a lot of guidence from all here in the forum . I just feel like I'm missing some of the gold when panning , so I tend to hold on to my consentraites that are in question . Thanks again Scott

Ok, so you've already got your feet wet . . .

Check out Doc's gold hog recovery systems: he's invested a lot of time and money refining the gold recovery process with his innovative mats and recovery machines. That's a good place to start.

On the forum you'll also find posts from other people on building their own miller tables, there's links to videos on clean-up sluices of various designs, there's the gold cube for running concentrates: the gold prospecting forum is a great place to start searching for ideas as you'll soon hit the motherlode.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Bonaro]

Thanks to all , I guess I should have put nube to a good clean up system , I have done a little prospecting over the last 40 years , in the early time my parents owned a rock shop and did some gold prospecting , I own several bussinesses at this point , excavation , logging and a campground in RI . I own most of the tools for prospecting tools , etc from my lapidary days . I have pans , classifiers , snifters , hand dredge , sluicing equipment , and all the hand tools necessary for finding gold by hand . I have a place near Littleton , NH . I will be spending about 8 months up there except for some bussiness travel to make sure every thing runs smooth . I will basically be up there all the time , except when I go home to see the wife . I have found some color , and I definetly need a lot of guidence from all here in the forum . I just feel like I'm missing some of the gold when panning , so I tend to hold on to my consentraites that are in question . Thanks again Scott

First, you need to realize that your goal should never be to extract every single speck of gold unless you simply find this a challenge and you dont care how much time you spend on it. Your goal should be to employ tools that will strike a good compromise between efficiency and production. Careful and skillful hand panning is the most efficient means of manual gold extraction but it's slow. Sluicing is probably 10x faster than panning and dredging is about 2x faster that a similar size hand sluice. As your production increases, your efficiency decreases. You can recover 98% of the gold in a 5 gallon bucket in one hour but you can recover 90% of the gold in 10 buckets in one hour with a dredge...the dredge will give you a bigger pile of gold at the end of the day.

For what you are doing I would suggest small drop riffle sluice like a LeTrap. It's light and portable so you can sample from spot to spot until you find a paystreak. Then go after it with a small dredge or power sluice. Use the LeTrap to re-concentrate your cleanups and hand pan the remainder.
A table is overkill and a wheel will process your cons in about 10 minutes then you still have to do some panning. Save your money and skip the wheel

 

[motohed]

Thanks Bonaro , I see you have centfuge gold screw panner , can you tell me about that sounds interesting .

 

[Lanny in AB]

The Knelson centrifuge and the gold screw panner are separate items. I've been with big operations that use the Knelson to reduce heavies.

The gold screw panner you can find videos on over at Youtube.

An inexpensive clean-up sluice (free plans on the Internet) will keep money in your pocket as stated.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[motohed]

Thanks Lanny , I'm thinking I may have separate metal in the concentrate I have saved . Maybe galina . etc , I know there is gold left because I can see light color , but I can't see to get it seperated enough to make me happy , I guess thats the Virgo in me . LOL

 

[arizau]

Thanks Lanny , I'm thinking I may have separate metal in the concentrate I have saved . Maybe galina . etc , I know there is gold left because I can see light color , but I can't see to get it seperated enough to make me happy , I guess thats the Virgo in me . LOL

It's been said before but....If the concentrate is tightly classified and panned separately by size then the galena or whatever is no match for same sized gold. Gold is over twice the weight of galena and much more than most anything else so classifying makes most panning a breeze and will make the adjustment of other equipment easier too.

Good luck

 

[goldenIrishman]

I agree with Arizau. Recovering the fine stuff is a lot easier when everything is classified to the same size. It doesn't matter which type of recovery system you decide on because without a full set of classifiers you can beat yourself to death trying to get the small gold separated from the tailing material. Your classifiers should include the following meshes. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/12, 1/20, 1/30, 1/50, 1/70, 1/100. Since you said yo already have some of the screen sizes on hand, I'd check Fee-Bay for the others. There are a couple sellers there that offer sets of 3 or 4 classifiers that you can choose the sizes in the set.

How far you take your cleanups is up to you. Eventually you have to learn to say "Enough is enough". There are other methods you can use, both with and without panning to get out even the micro gold. The majority of these can be very time consuming so most of us that use them hold off until the "off season" and have nothing else to do. Helps keep us sane when we can't be digging and processing new materials. (As if we were sane to start with!!! )

 

[winners58]

if you like machines, check this forum section; Trommeling

 

[Bonaro]

Thanks Bonaro , I see you have centfuge gold screw panner , can you tell me about that sounds interesting .

I have a couple of different screw panners or spiral wheels. My gold screw is by far the most durable but I am most partial to my gold genie. It seems a bit more user friendly and consistent. The spiral wheel is basically a spinning bowl set on an incline with a spiral grove cut into the inside of it. You feed it material along with water as it turns and the heavies are separated out and drawn up into the center where they are caught in a cup.

I also have a centrifuge which is a completely different machine. This uses centrifugal force to increase the weight differential between particles. It is capable of separating any particle from any other one so long as there is a difference in mass. Imagine a washing machine. It has a inner drum that spins and a outer drum that holds the water. Spin the inner drum at high RPM and add classified concentrates. The gold and other heavies will be flung to the outside with greater force than the light weight material. Water is injected into the outer drum and forced into the inner drum through all the tiny holes as it spins. This keeps all of the material in a fluid bed and prevents packing. Thats the quick and dirty explanation of how they work. They work pretty good but they are spendy and not easy to operate properly. I had a Hy-G centrifuge and swapped it for a Harley and now I have a smaller portable centrifuge built into a small trailer.