Hardrocker
Greenie
- Sep 25, 2012
- 13
- 0
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
Oh...this topic is near and dear to my heart!
The answer to the question is whether you can learn anything useful from crushing your own samples is a resounding yes. I start out with a simple cast iron pestel and mortar to do my preliminary testing. It is extremely useful to sift the rock you crush through a regular basket type sifter that you would use for baking. Mine is probably 20 or 30 mesh. I normally crush an ounce or two of rock per sample and then pan it out. The gold I find is reasonably coarse so this method releases enough of the gold from the rock to give me a good idea of how worthwhile a sample is.
I run the very best ore I find though a small rod mill that I made, but before that I crush it down to pea gravel size with a small jaw crusher that I bought on eBay. It takes about 4 hours for the rod mill to run a 5 gallon bucket of ore down to powder. I run water through the mill (which runs over a sluice box) while it's running so I'm left with a fairly small amount of material at the end. After running that through a concentrator, which I made, I'm left with about a half a gold pan of material. Talk about fun panning that out!
The mid grade ore I have is waiting for my mining partner to fix his impact mill which will run about a ton of material per day.
The answer to the question is whether you can learn anything useful from crushing your own samples is a resounding yes. I start out with a simple cast iron pestel and mortar to do my preliminary testing. It is extremely useful to sift the rock you crush through a regular basket type sifter that you would use for baking. Mine is probably 20 or 30 mesh. I normally crush an ounce or two of rock per sample and then pan it out. The gold I find is reasonably coarse so this method releases enough of the gold from the rock to give me a good idea of how worthwhile a sample is.
I run the very best ore I find though a small rod mill that I made, but before that I crush it down to pea gravel size with a small jaw crusher that I bought on eBay. It takes about 4 hours for the rod mill to run a 5 gallon bucket of ore down to powder. I run water through the mill (which runs over a sluice box) while it's running so I'm left with a fairly small amount of material at the end. After running that through a concentrator, which I made, I'm left with about a half a gold pan of material. Talk about fun panning that out!
The mid grade ore I have is waiting for my mining partner to fix his impact mill which will run about a ton of material per day.
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