Very Fine Gold Recovery?

Konrad

Tenderfoot
Dec 24, 2012
6
2
Western Washington State
Primary Interest:
Prospecting
Very Fine Gold Recovery?
Hello,

This is my first time at Treasurenet so bear with me if this is a repeated question.

I live in Western Washington close to the Puget Sound. The gold in my back yard and in local streams is very fine dust. In fact, sometimes the only way you can see it is under magnification (hand held lens). This is after classifying and running through a 5 inch sluice.

I have been strongly considering the purchase of the Desert Fox automatic panning machine along with a set of fine classifiers from e-bay but have not followed through.

My question is: What is the best way to extract very fine gold? It is there. I just can’t get it separated from the other debris reliably.

Thanks,
Konrad
 

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Thanks Russ, The Black sand is about twice as heavy so you will have to feed it half as fast. On the beach we run 20 buckets of black sand before we do a clean-up.
 

Thanks Russ, The Black sand is about twice as heavy so you will have to feed it half as fast. On the beach we run 20 buckets of black sand before we do a clean-up.

Half as fast...so that's about 5 minutes for a whole bucket then? (Still really quick for someone with 5 gal of black sand!)
 

LOL! Quit buying usless crap to clean up concentrates! You dump your concentrates into an old skillet, heat them until bone dry. Dump them back into a plastic gold pan and spread them. A large bottom pan is the best. Do about a pint at a time. Take a regular magnet and pull all the magnatite out such as one of the Keenes. Put that in one bowl. Then take a Neodymun N52 super magnet and go over them again, this time pulling out the platinum and hemitite which will not be picked up by a regular magnet as they are only paramagnetic. But the N52 will lift them. What's left is gold sand and some non magnetic rock.

You take this and run it through a 70 mesh strainer similar to screen wire. That should pan out easily. Then you run it through a 100 mesh classifier. The 70 to 100 should still pan out easily as this is still visible gold if you use a 6 inch metal finishing pan. The 100 mesh down will also yield to that 6 inch finishing pan. take it down as far as you can sweeping the lighter stuff away. Do about a teaspoon at a time. This will be the largest portion of your gold, it is just invisible to the naked eye. This product gets poured into a crucible and fired with flux and a button poured.

The platinum and the hemitite is panned the same way until you pan out most of the hemitite. That product is put in a pyrex beaker and is covered with about 1/4 inch of strong sulphuric acid. That will eat away the remaining hematite leaving just the platinum. This is done outside of course :) The acid can be nutrellized with baking soda in water. No use to try to melt platinum unless you have a way to focus 4500 degree heat! They will take it just fine as platinum dust at the reclamation center:)

The black magnatite is crushed in a small mortar and pedstal until the lord comes back and then dumped into a small ball mill and ground some more! A bit of charged mercury is then tumbled with it under water and it will clean the black sands. Look up "pipe retort" on youtube to see how to get 100% of your mercury back safely and of course all your gold.

It ain't no step for a stepper! Blue bowls, micro sluces, wave tables, gold wheels don't work. They just don't.

Oh yeah, send me a couple of grams for telling you how :)
 

Mitch, I'm fascinated with the idea that most of the gold would be in the 100- material. Do you have some pictures to show processing steps for that material? I want to learn more.

...I have all my magnetic and non magnetic super concentrates from the last year or so of digging so I have some material to try out with your process :)

PS I happen to agree with you about all the toys they sell for processing concentrates. A waste of time and money in almost every case.
 

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