Processing serious flour size gold, working with super fine gold Options

[jackragusa]

I read a lot about folks working with a Blue Bowl on very fine gold, but I find it's much slower than just panning . Besides, the seriously fine golds also works it's way out of the blue bowl even under the slowest workable speeds. I have a large bucket of con.s I would love to go thru and I am sure the gold is there but the labor of just panning is just not worth the time. Other than a wave table or a shaker table which is obviously way too expensive to balance out, what choices do I have. Even if there was say an ounce to an ounce and a half of flour gold in the bucket, I would still be making only half of min. wage panning it and I do ok panning. But with panning this size gold, you have to go thru everything three times to insure you didnt miss anything. So please HELP....

[swizz]

I would still be making only half of min wage panning it...

Hi Jack and welcome to CP!
I'll get to the Blue Bowl advice in a sec but I feel the need to comment briefly regarding your "min wage" comment.
If you are prospecting with the intent of 'making money' and are numerically factoring in hourly labor, equipment, fuel, overhead, etc... I have practical advice for you: stop now.
Huge longshot unless you are a commercial or small scale miner.... even then, a wild wild wild crapshoot. Myself and many other claim owners can repeatedly attest this (CO, AK, CA, OR, MT, etc.. pick any Gold bearing state). Breaking even is considered a major success and VERY few even do that. If you don't own a claim and are just "winging it" or still in the prospecting stages of exploration your odds are even lower. If you're just playing at designated open spaces, parks, rec areas regulated by County jurisdictions or "Gold Club/Camp" claims offered by for-profit outfits... forget about trying to turn a profit entirely, that's not what they're there for (unless you're the owner raking in fees, lol). I don't want to discourage you but consider the realistic odds of actually turning a consistent profit (or ANY profit)... astronomical.
Bottom line is - you have to enjoy it. The real treasure is in the hunt for those that stick with it. I'll likely never get 'rich' from my claim but hit enough pockets, pickers, and the occasional nug to put a huge smile on my face (Woody and Pat find all the big stuff ). I also offer my claim to CP LT members (whom generally share the same philosophy) at no charge so they can experience the same simple pleasures (and keep everything they find of course). That's part of what makes it "worth it" to me. I don't have the audacity to operate under the pretense that I'm doing this for full blown profit. It is certainly a possibility that I could profit from my minerals... and definitely always on the plate, but that's not the burning core of my motivation. Solitude, friendships, learning, exploring, exercising my rights, sharing, and simply collecting. These elements factor largely into the reasoning behind my mining pursuits and I'm never disappointed.

Is this worth your time, minimum wage, or more than likely a small loss of investment? That's up to you. It's not worth the time or anything else of most sane people. It's worth my time and investments (of course I'm insane). Depends largely on how you measure the "worth" of your time. The worth of my time isn't measured in currency or minimum wage when it comes to mining... and certainly not during micron recovery. The micron recovery is more of a fun thing to do in the off season and yields a little "bonus flour Gold" to supplement the stash. Spock would tell me this behavior is "highly illogical" but Vulcans have no concept of "fun".... and they are a droll culture.

That being said...
Blue Bowls, tables, and some jigs are the best known ways to process fine concentrates and effectively recover micron (-100) Gold. None of these are extremely fast... nor are they 100% effective... no device is. Choose one, weigh the pros and cons based on your criteria, and lower your expectations a hair.
Most of the Gold I recover is larger that #30 so I don't really care about the smaller stuff as much. I personally use a slightly modified Blue Bowl setup for everything smaller than #30. I save those concentrates for the snowy days of winter and set up the Blue Bowl recirculating station in the living room while I watch football, golf, or Goldfathers, etc. In other words I process the micron cons during down-time.... when it's more "fun". Well... (for me) it's more fun than just sitting there and watching TV. I definitely don't care that the Bowl loses some microns, no big deal... I'd go mad trying to recover every microscopic speck. It is such a small and insignificant percentage to worry about... especially if you are skilled with the recovery device.
Stick with the Blue Bowl if that's what you have... you will get faster and better with it. Forget the instructions that came with it! There are some basic mods and techniques for the Bowl (several great threads on this site) that can make the process more efficient. I don't know of any small scale micron recovery equipment that is even moderately 'fast' at final separation. That is the downside of collecting and processing flour Gold. Larger Gold is much easier to process. If you only have access to locations that yield 99% flour Gold I would move along prospecting unless it is consistently in huge quantities... like in Nome or possibly the Great Lakes. You can find chunkier stuff than flour in Colorado if you know your way around. Overall easier to recover and separate... purty to look at too.

Good luck out there, and for God's sake have fun with whatever you choose to do!