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....

[Dypheron]

Like many hobbies the cost grows exponentially with return. Can you enjoy it and do well with a $20 investment in a pan and scoop? Sure. Can you spend a few thousand, have every widget and wizwam in search of the super fine stuff? Absolutely. The question to ask is what level of time, effort, and money are you willing to put into getting the super fine stuff? I'm sure that for every pinhead speck of gold I got last outing at least 2-3 of the same size blew right out with the tailings. That's fine. My return of investment comes from enjoying my time outside in the sun. What I see happening, at least with my outings in the future, is to not look for the so called "immediate return on investment" and gratification that comes from getting every speck out the same week I've pulled it from the river. Instead, I'll pull the large stuff, say 30+ out right away and save the 30- for processing over the winter with a beer and roaring fire. Chris is right when he mentions production rates in the field. I believe I ran about 5-6 buckets of classified material on our last outing to get a grain or two of color classifying down to 2-. I could probably get the same production going to 4- with some more effort, but the consensus is that 2- is really all you need.

As far as being wrong about making money prospecting, sure, it's possible. Let's take a minute to look at base cost for an average trip, not including the cost of all the equipment used. If you're lucky and live near an above average producing area then you might spend $10 on gas. Most of us are not that lucky and spend closer to $50 round trip. Insurance and basic services must be included too, those are a cost of maintaining your equipment to get to your area. Say, $40. You probably ate while you were there, maybe bought a pack of smokes for the trip, say $10 total. That's $100 you're down for one weekend. Obviously if you go out more than once a month the overall cost goes down, but we're looking at the average joe here on the forums here. That's roughly 2 grams of gold that you have to recover just to get back in the black. Now add in the one time cost for pans, shovel/pick/scoop,sluice,gold cube,blue bowl, etc and that adds up quick. Jackragusa, you mentioned working beaches on the west coast. That's all well and good for that location. You don't have a location in your profile so I can't comment on the cost of a trip to the coast, I think that's out of scope for the average forum user here. While we have members from all over the country (and world for that matter) the focus is really for prospecting in Colorado. I'm pretty sure that's the reason it's called Colorado Prospector. In any case, I don't think any member here, myself included, is trying to say that it's impossible to make money doing this. It's more about expectation management. It's a hobby. Hobbies usually cost more than what you get in return. You wouldn't normally expect a huge return on having a garden, going fishing, or putting together model cars, why would recreational and/or small scale mining be any different? 'Course, I bet the GPAA has something different to say on the matter with their fancy claims. Just my

[nuggetstosmall]

I use an 30 lb electric shovel to break up the dirt, then shovel into an earthquake shaker to bring the dirt down to 12 mesh. Then run it through a 60" sluice. The cons left are brought down to -30 to -100. Then blue bowl it, with a makeshift gold lab setup. Realizing that the blue bowl has to be LEVEL and that gold lab setup is perfect and you'll get 99%. Watch the yt videos on gold lab. I can run 20 5 gal buckets in a day, takes 2 hours to dig, 2-3 hours to run it through the sluice. The blue bowl, I take home and run the cons there. No pressure on the time and can really do a good job on it.