Best way to catch gold from crushed ore?

[Wint]

Good morning folks,

I recently purchased a USA Prospectors miller table and have been running some gold ore that I had crushed up. Was hoping it would work well to catch all the gold as I am running sub 50 mesh through this. But it seems I am loosing a very large amount of flakes over the edge. I've read that miller tables can be great for flat gold, like stuff from rivers, but they are not too great on gold from hard-rock. Does anyone use something in particular to collect the fine gold from their crushed hard-rock ore? I don't have the money for a shaker table, but am willing to invest in something like a blue bowl or gold cube if you have had good luck with those. Not sure if I should be posting this in hard rock mining, I know this section gets a lot more eyes. I will keep this miller table to run the black sands I have from the river, but I don't think this is going to work out for me on the crushed ore. Any and all thoughts and comments are appreciated!

'Wint'

 

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[RTR]

Years ago I built a 22"x44" Miller Table .Coated the top with 2 coats of this .And it catches round & flat gold w/o any problems.Whats critical is, water flow rate and angle of table
Using that pump and 1" drop per running foot of table works great.Also I cut (w/table saw) a 1/4" gold trench for the -100 mesh stuff
Blue bowls work if you have all day.

 

[russau]

As RTR said , I agree BUT for the smaller fines I'd screen them at different mesh sizes and run them separately with slower water speeds & amounts. I made my Miller Table out of some 3/8 inch slate and it worked great. I had made a M.T. out of plywood and coated it with the black board paint and it worked good also BUT after a lot of run cons , I'd had to repaint it! I preferred actual slate by far!!

 

[Wint]

Man I really need to bite the bullet and invest in a Table Saw one of these days! I measured out my table now and its just about 12" long (Quite short in comparison to yours). The pump I am using is a 317gph, currently I am running it at about 3/4 of max. I measure from my water flow entrance to the end of my table and I only have about a 1/4" of drop for the 12" of length. Do you think it would be better for me to lower the water flow and increase my pitch? The flow of water coming off my end is measuring about 1/8" of an inch deep. Appreciate you guys helping me out! I've got a catch basin below so I'm fortunately not really losing anything. Will just have to re-run it once I get this thing dialed in. I also don't really have this panned down to just black sand, but I am still finding what looks like gold, as well as possibly copper and silver.

 

[RTR]

Best thing is to experiment w/different water volumes and different drop per foot on the table.As long as your catching the run off your not losing anythingI found my table(the way its set up) likes 20 to 40 mesh material. Once you get it dialed in you'll love it and the gold will drop out pretty much where you drop it,on the table

 

[RTR]

Wint
Are you classifying the material ?

 

[Wint]

Yea I have a set of classifiers, I am currently running the stuff that dropped through the 50 mesh, but is too big to go through the 100 (I don't have a size in-between) I also haven't really panned it down much, couple of pics attached for reference.

 

[RTR]

Yea I have a set of classifiers, I am currently running the stuff that dropped through the 50 mesh, but is too big to go through the 100 (I don't have a size in-between) I also haven't really panned it down much, couple of pics attached for reference.


View attachment 1943350

View attachment 1943355

You could buy a set of these for not much money. I've Used them for many years and their still good.

 

[RTR]

A Falcon MD-20 will find it.
>> https://cdn.seriousdetecting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/md20-teststrip.jpg <<< and smaller gold than the test card shows.

 

[Wint]

Ooo, that's a neat little tool. I should really get into Metal Detecting. My fathers property was all old farmland. Being from Connecticut there is surely a lot of buried history here. I think a lot of what I was seeing may have been copper flakes rolling off, but there was deff some little specs of gold as well, I was able to see them side by side with the copper.

 

[Georgia Placer]

Mercury

 

[Goodyguy]

A Miller table works best when ALL the particles being run are the same size. Same with a blue bowl, spiral wheel, or any other device to a lesser degree, but it's more critical on a blue bowl or miller table.

If the flow is too fast the flat gold will surf on down the table. Dont forget to use a few drops of JET-DRY but not too much!
Be sure the flakes you are losing are really gold.

Also, place a section of scotch brite pad under where the water enters to where the water goes under the gate.
This will smooth out the flow perfectly!

Remember to always feed a Miller table with wet material never dry.

GG~

 

[russau]

and use a rare earth magnet on your dry cons to remove any magnetite BEFORE you run them wet in any device. It'll save you lots of work.

 

[augoldminer]

I always used a tungsten table with a Wilfley head motion.

with it the three tungsten (Scheelite)groves that go compleatly across the table got 99% of the gold and then i used amalgamater to clean the cons.

water adjustmentsnts are what get many people to much will wash your gold down the table too little will cut the ammount of gold in the cons

 

[ganthercage]

Good morning folks,

I recently purchased a USA Prospectors miller Speed Test table and have been running some gold ore that I had crushed up. Was hoping it would work well to catch all the gold as I am running sub 50 mesh through this. But it seems I am loosing a very large amount of flakes over the edge. I've read that miller tables can be great for flat gold, like stuff from rivers, but they are not too great on gold from hard-rock. Does anyone use something in particular to collect the fine gold from their crushed hard-rock ore? I don't have the money for a shaker table, but am willing to invest in something like a blue bowl or gold cube if you have had good luck with those. Not sure if I should be posting this in hard rock mining, I know this section gets a lot more eyes. I will keep this miller table to run the black sands I have from the river, but I don't think this is going to work out for me on the crushed ore. Any and all thoughts and comments are appreciated!

'Wint'

There is the Blue Bowl, the Gold Cube, Shaker Tables, and all the different Spiral Wheels. I am leaning towards the Keene Spiral Wheel. Has anyone used a number of these products and can give an opinion on the best one available? I want to quickly and easily get the flour gold out of my concentrates without panning.

 

[Goodyguy]

There is the Blue Bowl, the Gold Cube, Shaker Tables, and all the different Spiral Wheels. I am leaning towards the Keene Spiral Wheel. Has anyone used a number of these products and can give an opinion on the best one available? I want to quickly and easily get the flour gold out of my concentrates without panning.

I have used them all, and to tell the truth I have never recovered enough "flour" gold to pay for any of them.
Forget about quick. Just getting down to the flour gold (100 to -200) is pretty slow going.

In my experience the Blue Bowl is great at recovering "flour gold" but it is very time consuming.
Spiral wheels work well for recovering flakes and fines but not so much for flour gold even with extreme classification and fine tuning, again, a slow process.

The Gold Cube is a concentrator, not designed to separate flour gold.
Shaker tables are very expensive and if you are a small scale miner not worth the expense or setup involved, they also take time to do the separation.

Nowadays I pan everything, it's much faster and what I lose isn't really worth the time, effort, or energy, not to mention the expense of trying to capture.
Of course where I mine now there really isn't much flour gold to deal with.

I will challenge any spiral wheel to a panning contest. Panning by hand is many times faster!
The really large spiral wheels are good for when you have many buckets of cons to process but other than that, panning by hand is still the way to go.

Get really good at panning, it will pay off in the long run.




Go for the Gold
GG~

 

[russau]

I liked to pan down until I got all I could and then put the rest into a bucket to save until the Winter time . Like GG ( Buddy) I tried them all over the years and had fun doing so !

 

[Goodyguy]

I liked to pan down until I got all I could and then put the rest into a bucket to save until the Winter time . Like GG ( Buddy) I tried them all over the years and had fun doing so !

I didn't say it wasn't fun, I enjoyed every minute/hour of it. I love gadgets
But there is just no way to separate out flour gold in a hurry.

Even using "charged" mercury you still have to take the time to charge the mercury, amalgamate, and set up to run it through a retort for final recovery.
Mercury & retort is probably the fastest method of all, however there is a bit of a learning curve to handle it safely.

CLICK HERE-> ABOUT ALMALGAMATION AND USING MERCURY

GG~

 

[RTR]

Magnified many times.... ( a few dozen specs).... Minus 100 mesh gold caught on the Miller table (so small in fact, they are floating on water, in this Pix. )

 

[Goodyguy]

Magnified many times.... ( a few dozen specs).... Minus 100 mesh gold caught on the Miller table (so small in fact, they are floating on water, in this Pix. )

I enjoy the Miller table most of all. Really the most bang for the buck and simple to build.
Genuine slate works best! Dont forget the jet-dry to keep the flour gold from floating away.