What does everyone use for equipment to clean your gold?

[eric91m]

I'm just curious on what everyone on this forum is using. I think this might get a little interesting seeing everyone's setup that they use.

Myself I use a few different pieces of equipment.

I have a cheap 4X6 rock crusher (output ~1/2") then feeding into a custom impact mill (20x26" drum with 40 chain hammers). There is a water input into the impact mill to create a wet slurry which goes into a M8 table, the cons from this table go directly to a m5 table for final cleanup.

Only bad part is I decided to find a new claim somewhere a little easier to mine then Ca (not to mention my ore was starting to stop producing I was averaging about 2.61oz/t when i started and was to the point of 1.2oz/t when i decided it was time to call it quits). So for now its all sitting in the garage with my type 2 storage magazines taking up a ton of space.

 

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[gold tramp]

In the old days we had a rod mill set up, 6x8 jaw, drop into double set 200 lb rolls we had a little home built bucket elevator that filled hopper, had screw feeding a 8ft x 36in rod with 20 or so rods in it, throughput fed a mixing tromel which fed 48 inch monel steel spiral and finaly wave table and a 12 foot sluice for the tails.

it was mostly home built and was powered by three phase diesel gen was a sight to see running.
we had a couple good runs but partners got greedy, sued me over the whole deal and took it, no one ever used the damn thing its still just sittin over there.
now im building an arrastra cant keep a miner down, just build another mill !!
GT..................

 

[Dustedyou]

tear it up tramp.. Im using a http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/h...ock-crusher-36-bucks-homemade-tearing-up.html and a ball mill http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/h...all-mill-ohh-soo-quiet-total-cost-me-5-a.html and then pan like a freak after a run thru a Gold Cube.. im floating gold horribly bad.. so now im building a Shaker table out of a Granite remnant.. OO and i built a source Forge for Smelting, a Retort for recovery, and several Sluices also for recovery.. and once I find a way to get every single speck out of the grind ill be a happy camper.. LMAO

 

[the Ricker]

Dusted, New term for me is source forge? Can you explain a little. Also you built your retort? Can you also elaborate and guess at capacity and cost?

 

[tamrock]

tear it up tramp.. Im using a http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/h...ock-crusher-36-bucks-homemade-tearing-up.html and a ball mill http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/h...all-mill-ohh-soo-quiet-total-cost-me-5-a.html and then pan like a freak after a run thru a Gold Cube.. im floating gold horribly bad.. so now im building a Shaker table out of a Granite remnant.. OO and i built a source Forge for Smelting, a Retort for recovery, and several Sluices also for recovery.. and once I find a way to get every single speck out of the grind ill be a happy camper.. LMAO

Cool stuff Dusted. I Love it! They should have a reality show about folks like you. Maybe call it The Salvage Yard Engineers? I'd watch it. I need something new to watch, cause thats about all I do in the motels when on the road. Watch Pawn Stars, American Pickers, Antiques Road Show and the like. I've seen all the episodes. Need new stuff.

 

[smokeythecat]

In my case, what gold?

 

[Fullpan]

I'm just curious on what everyone on this forum is using. I think this might get a little interesting seeing everyone's setup that they use.

Myself I use a few different pieces of equipment.

I have a cheap 4X6 rock crusher (output ~1/2") then feeding into a custom impact mill (20x26" drum with 40 chain hammers). There is a water input into the impact mill to create a wet slurry which goes into a M8 table, the cons from this table go directly to a m5 table for final cleanup.

Only bad part is I decided to find a new claim somewhere a little easier to mine then Ca (not to mention my ore was starting to stop producing I was averaging about 2.61oz/t when i started and was to the point of 1.2oz/t when i decided it was time to call it quits). So for now its all sitting in the garage with my type 2 storage magazines taking up a ton of space.

Thanks for quoting the oz/tn figures - kinda surprising that mom-and-pop operations would struggle with making a profit from 1.2 oz/tn. Guess its harder than
I imagined.

 

[eric91m]

Thanks for quoting the oz/tn figures - kinda surprising that mom-and-pop operations would struggle with making a profit from 1.2 oz/tn. Guess its harder than
I imagined.

It wasn't that it wasn't profitable anymore, it wasn't as profitable as what we were looking for. You have to figure; lease expenses, equipment maintenance, insurance, explosives (dynamite, detcord, and time delay detonators), fuel for equipment etc. The list gets quite big and the deeper you go it gets more expensive to get the ore.

I had a crew of 7 not counting myself working 24 hour operations for 8 months of the year. All of them were guys I'd served in the military with, so It wasn't just a BS pay I was giving them. We split the profits. At the beginning the pay was extremely good, but it started to fade away so we're searching for more ground as I type this.

As far as profits were concerned it wasn't about making me rich as much as making everyone comfortable. Everything was split evenly and no expenses were hidden. We were running roughly 9-14 tons of ore a day (blasting 3X daily). At first we were looking at roughly 600 a day before taxes, at the end roughly 250. The work is hard and wasn't worth what we were getting, we voted and everyone agreed.

Great news is this coming Christmas I have gifts for everyone due to the sulfides coming back from the refiner along with part of what we would put to the side for emergencies (be it to go visit family, personal payments that needed attention, etc) These guys are looking at 41.75oz (refined .9999) a piece for a Christmas bonus.

So in short we could have kept going, but we have spent too long away from our families in the past and the current profit wasn't making the difference of not watching our kids grow up. We're still in the hunt for more land, we have a few ideas for prospecting in Alaska this coming spring and summer.

Had I ventured in by myself and maybe one more guy we would still be working the ground next year, but the amount of ore we would have run would be way less.

 

[Fullpan]

Thank you very much for giving us a glimpse into a small hard rock operation. The fact that you shared the whole thing with your buds, really warms my
heart and gives me new hope.

P.s. - that's a CRAZY wild Xmas bonus !!!

 

[Dustedyou]

Dusted, New term for me is source forge? Can you explain a little. Also you built your retort? Can you also elaborate and guess at capacity and cost?

OK check out my Forge Post .. the Retort cost me about 36$ (went to a Recycler and got the parts) but i used a design off the web aka Alibaba.. they have a very simple retort to build.

 

[the Ricker]

Thank you...Alibaba is already in my favorites. I will poke around.

 

[gold tramp]

Were you all sinkin a shaft ? and what kind of ore were you running if you don't mind talkin bout your dig.
sounds like you had one heck of an ore body Fissure vein ?
GT................

 

[eric91m]

We were sinking a inclined shaft following a 19" thick quartz outcropping. We had totaled 19 cross-cuts and multiple small stopes.

We followed a massive quartz outcropping from the surface (in a very historical district, known production within 5 miles of our claim was over 120,000 oz lode deposits, over 1,250,000 oz placer), our incline shaft was at 2100' depth (not counting the angle). However we did find numerous smaller quartz veins we blasted out in the process.

Once we were loosing the oz/t average we wanted, we core drilled from our lowest level down into the vein. It was a massive producer at depth, but we didn't have the funds nor experience to get that deep (over 1000m deeper).

As far as the exact rock I couldn't tell you. The ore body was White Quartz w/ Au, Fe, Ag, Pt, Pd. Main metals present were Fe and Au, the rest were mixed with the Au.

 

[gold tramp]

youall got a bunch of silver in that vein i bet, to bad you couldn't continue your dig.
did you hit any cyrstaline gold if you don't mind tellin?

Did you encounter any copper on the way down? and if you did was that where you hit your pockets or stopes ?
Good to talk about hard mining thanks.
GT...................

 

[eric91m]

Yes there was a lot of silver in there also. In terms of metals recovered in order from most to least - Iron, Copper, Gold, Silver. It did kinda suck leaving behind ~3 years worth of work, but just wasn't worth it, you know what they say "A inch away from a million...".

Yes we did hit crystalline gold, most times with more copper nearby. We stoped mainly due to numerous smaller quartz veins following the big one. We did test stope a few areas strictly because of the quantity of gold produced from the ore of specific blast(s), sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn't.

One of the things we did differently then most was crush everything coming out of our mine, we didn't bother sorting by grades, as far as we had tested there was still free-mill gold in the rock surrounding the main ore body, not much but it was there. We had the table (M8) to separate everything, Iron was pulled out on the feed tube to the m8 with magnets and a series of dump sections (remove the magnets and drain plugs run fresh water to remove, done every hour), we would run about 1.5 tph into our plant. There were days we ran the plant would be going 20+ hours.

If I did it over again I'd get a bigger rock crusher, possibly a cone crusher. A feeder hopper to feed the crusher. And I would have stepped up to bigger tables. Once we find our next place if its logical we're stepping up to 2 M10 tables, 2-4 M8 tables, then the M5 finishing table. I'd have the M10s separate the heavies, then depending on the ore would decide the m8 functions with either a inline setup or paired (given the same ore; 1 to separate copper, 1 for Gold, 1 for sulfides and the other for silver). Then again that would be a easy 63k in new tables, another 20-50k in a crusher, then another 15k in water tanks adding to what we have, plus another 50kw generator. The price to upgrade to what we want would easily be 98k-128k+, and we already have some of what we'd need or it'd be closer to the 170k mark.

 

[Dustedyou]

Yes there was a lot of silver in there also. In terms of metals recovered in order from most to least - Iron, Copper, Gold, Silver. It did kinda suck leaving behind ~3 years worth of work, but just wasn't worth it, you know what they say "A inch away from a million...".

Yes we did hit crystalline gold, most times with more copper nearby. We stoped mainly due to numerous smaller quartz veins following the big one. We did test stope a few areas strictly because of the quantity of gold produced from the ore of specific blast(s), sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn't.

One of the things we did differently then most was crush everything coming out of our mine, we didn't bother sorting by grades, as far as we had tested there was still free-mill gold in the rock surrounding the main ore body, not much but it was there. We had the table (M8) to separate everything, Iron was pulled out on the feed tube to the m8 with magnets and a series of dump sections (remove the magnets and drain plugs run fresh water to remove, done every hour), we would run about 1.5 tph into our plant. There were days we ran the plant would be going 20+ hours.

If I did it over again I'd get a bigger rock crusher, possibly a cone crusher. A feeder hopper to feed the crusher. And I would have stepped up to bigger tables. Once we find our next place if its logical we're stepping up to 2 M10 tables, 2-4 M8 tables, then the M5 finishing table. I'd have the M10s separate the heavies, then depending on the ore would decide the m8 functions with either a inline setup or paired (given the same ore; 1 to separate copper, 1 for Gold, 1 for sulfides and the other for silver). Then again that would be a easy 63k in new tables, another 20-50k in a crusher, then another 15k in water tanks adding to what we have, plus another 50kw generator. The price to upgrade to what we want would easily be 98k-128k+, and we already have some of what we'd need or it'd be closer to the 170k mark.

Haha yes allways new tools.. " the best way to make a million dollars mining is to start with 2 million."