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....

[Mitch Dickson]

It seems like I have stared in this movie :) Have you ever been to a sporting good store and seen the rows of fishing lures? Well those are made to catch fishermen, not fish! It is the same in a prospector's supply store. 90% of the products are ment to catch prospectors, not gold :)

Now I own at least one each of the latest gold catchers and seperation schemes. I have them all piled up in the back of a stall of the barn. Blue bowls, micro sluices, cubes, Mckirks, you name it, they are all substitutes, and poor at that, for a tumbler and some charged quicksilver. I do not advocate the novice to try amalgamation for you have to know the dangers and the methods to recover 100% of the HG. But for the serious professional, there is no other practical way.

But just getting the gold out of black sand is only half of it! A lot of that black sand is platinum and that is harder to remove than the gold. The one flaw in platinum that is in your favor is that it is paramagnetic. A regular magnet will remove the magnatite but will not lift platimun and hematite. A super Neodeym 52 magnet will lift platinum and you can seperate it that way, but you have to treat it with nitric acid to burn off the hematite leaving just the platinum. (there ain't nothing easy)

Now there are creeks (and beaches) where the platinum values exceed the gold values! The folks who buy your black sands are after, not only the -100 gold you leave in there, but the platinum you don't know is there as well. They will not be using a blue bowl to get it out :) Now if you don't have the tools and expertise, I suggest you sell the black sands after you have worked them for they do you no good just to set them around in buckets or tubs. "Maybe someday" never comes and a little money is better than none.

Now listen up! For first you have to capture the micro gold and platinum and you are probably not using a method that will do the job. Creeks that are alive with -100 gold are far more prevalent that creeks with pepper sized flakes. You must work the micron gold for there is where the value lies! And if you can't find and capture platinum are you walking off from creeks that are just as alive with -100 platinum but have very little gold? This ain't 1849, you have to change your thinking.

What you need is a device that costs less than $25, can be worked all day without a clean out, will capture all gold and platimun down to -300 mesh, and has a less than 3% return to tailings, and can fit in a backpack. Impossible? Not at all, in fact you may already own one! It is a LeTrap square gold pan, modified with a 1/2 pvc appliance that turns it into a fluid box. Just set her on the ground, raise the back to where she flows over the front riffles, hook up a small battery powered pump and feed the center with 1/4 classified material. Easy to hook up to a recirculator for working the desert as well. You will pile up your sluice boxes in the barn and give away your dredges as I did long ago. Don't forget to thank old man LeTrap for selling it for $15 LMAO! I hope this picture comes through.

C YA

Mitch