MILLER TABLE, Build is almost done Options

[rollcenter]

Ok This is my version of a Miller Table I hope to have it running tomorrow with my Sluice and a 100- mesh finale in the recirculating box... First is what I am running.
The Pump box and header to run the spray bar for the table the spray bar for the sluice and a future Blue Bowl along with a nozzle for clean up.











 Miller_Table_Build_001.MOV ( 2.56MB ) Number of downloads: 320

[Yoda]

I'm gonna have a lot of questions for you, because I have built two miller tables now ... but only one worked out at all, and not like I wanted. I generally have problems keeping the water flow spread out and glassy without pumping too much water (thereby blowing out the gold), so its probably because I haven't had real slate to work with, and the media I did have I couldn't ever get to lay perfectly flat.

But first, I should ask if there is more to the video? What I downloaded was less than a second in length, a glimpse at best.

[rollcenter]

I'm gonna have a lot of questions for you, because I have built two miller tables now ... but only one worked out at all, and not like I wanted. I generally have problems keeping the water flow spread out and glassy without pumping too much water (thereby blowing out the gold), so its probably because I haven't had real slate to work with, and the media I did have I couldn't ever get to lay perfectly flat.

But first, I should ask if there is more to the video? What I downloaded was less than a second in length, a glimpse at best.

Well the thing is my first table as yet to run it But. If you look I built a water trap for the spray bar to make it flow even across the table. I am going to try the Sponge that is in it. If that dosnt work then I will go to a Swamp Cooler filter my concern is getting no air bubbles. As for flow I have a inlet valve and a outlet valve to control flow as even as possible. If I have to I will add a rubber strap lower down to force the floaters into the water. My pump is a 750 gph with a return bypass at the table and the sluice spray bar at the bottom so flow can be controlled all the way around and if need be I can use the third line on the header to bypass back into the tank. I will have the thing up by noon and will post more on it as I tune it up. I think that this table will be upgraded in a very short time as I already have Ideas for better performance. I didnt know I could load a video here lol Thanks Yoda Look for a video soon on it running. EVERYONE HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND and to those who did THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

[Crusty]

Looks like a fun project; hope it works like you want it to!

[Yoda]

As for flow I have a inlet valve and a outlet valve to control flow as even as possible.

Aha! That would explain the manifold. Clever ... you really took no chance on the water flow, almost overkill but not quite ... I like it! The spray bar at the end... as well as for balancing water flow out, to keep the light tailings that build up at the bottom from gathering?

What media did you use for the surface? Almost looks like you managed to get a piece of pool table slate?

And I really look forward to seeing you put it to use. You clearly have great attention to detail.

[rollcenter]

Success The Miller Table Rocks
So here it is running The material for the table was a OBS sheet 1/2 by 24 by 4 feet I used spray adhesive to attach some Hobbico cutting pad then sealed the seams with black silicone caulk Thats it. I tried to upload vid but to long. So this is just a test with sand from my driveway

[rollcenter]

OK so in the first picture in this thread that is where I started Now I am here and need some real advice since I most likely lost some in the process. How do I get this cleaned up to just fine gold ?????


I have yet to do a clean up of the sluice and I have a lot that went right into the recerc box that I have to clean up. This has already gone thru a 100 mesh I just do not have any IDEA as to what I should do now. Done the best I could for my first time with a pan. Any help would be mucho aprechiado

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[Yoda]

OK, so what you have left in the pan, at this point, is fine concentrates, pretty well classified. This is where your miller table is intended to shine. I would take those normally from the sluice, personally, and classify down to 30 mesh, 70 mesh, and 100 mesh, and process each seperately. What moves 30 mesh can blow 100 mesh down the table. Miller tables don't usually work too well with anything larger than 30 mesh, but your table is very long, giving you lots of opportunity to react to the higher pitch/flow needed, so you can try 20 mesh and it will probably be ok. In your case, it's all 100 mesh in that pan, so you have less work to do. Sorta. (I'll explain down in the "Sad Panda Notes.)

You should be taking small scoops of that concentrate, and allowing your miller table to do the work. One Tsp or so at a time, scoop directly onto miller table, spread out into a thin line across the top of the table, and watch. (which from your photos, looks like what you are doing, but you might want to spread it more, some of those pics look a little bunched up too heavily/too high). Miller tables are NOT fast in operation... a good spoon full should take 30-60 seconds to fully separate and expose the gold, depending on how thick you lay it down (resist dumping too much until you are confident your gold isn't being washed out, looking at your tables width of 24", you should be able to graduate to a tablespoon pretty quickly once you are able to lay down your line of concentrates with a practiced hand) ... but when you consider how clean your gold will be afterwords, you'll recognize the benefit. Much faster than a blue bowl, much more confidence in whether your gold is being blown out or not.

First, just as I start operating I add a few drops of Jet-Dry to my water reservoir, to lower the opportunity for gold floating. Don't add too much, if it bubbles regularly, you've added too much and need to replace some of your recirculating water with untreated water until you aren't bubbling again. A few drops will lower the surface tension of the water and help counter any oils (which also helps gold to float. Be sure you cleaned any oils from manufacturing from your miller table's surface prior to first use, or your gold will fly off with everything else.)

With the miller table's flow, any remaining quartz sands, garnet specs, general dirt and junk etc should move down the table relatively quickly, with the black sands sticking a bit yet sluggishly moving and pealing off slowly from the tiny piles of material, and the little bits of gold slowly being "revealed" and not moving around much at all. If the gold is moving a lot, you need to either lower the flow (to just enough to maintain that glassy surface, but not so low so that you don't maintain even flow). If the water is there already, lower the pitch of the table to a less aggressive angle. Miller tables don't normally have a pitch above 1" / foot, usually its less (mine likes 1/2" per foot). If the black sand/magnatite and other heavies are not lifting from the gold in under a minute, then you likely need to increase the pitch in small increments, but I strongly caution you to not play with the water flow too much, because every tick above the minimum for maintaining that glassy sheet is that tick that starts moving your gold instead of leaving it planted. If anything, as you raise pitch, you might want to drop the water flow a tick. The good thing is your miller table is exceptional in length, the bad thing is that if gold is EVER getting so far down as to need 4 feet of length, you are almost certainly not tuned in right (usually on our scale, 2 feet is plenty of length; anything longer is for very gold rich concentrates that us smaller scale miners only dream to see, and would require slightly different techniques and longer processing times... but your extra table length isn't hurting you at all either). You'd be surprised at how well a miller table will "hold" from even the tiniest of meshes of gold when it is tuned correctly. Tuning is possible (and highly recommended) between different meshes of classification, with micro adjustments needed to ensure the really fine stuff doesn't clear out too quickly and retains the gold. Usually I start with the larger mesh, and work down to the exceptionally fine stuff.

I then set aside a spare inch or two of the top of the table's flow for piling the gold, and I won't allow anything but water to run over that spot... all processing occurs on the remaining width. If you have it tuned right, the gold will just sit in that clean pile of gold you keep sweeping over to that side, without the water flow affecting it much at all. If you run from larger mesh to smaller, you don't even need to clean out the pile of gold until you have run all your cons (because the bigger stuff will stick even better as you tune for the smaller stuff). When you are done with all the concentrates, spread your gold pile out enough to allow the really heavy impurities a chance to move out, and then run a magnet over it (save what you yank up with it into a another pan). Once complete, I usually raise the lower end of the table to make it relatively flat, lightly add a puddle of clean water to re-saturate the gold, and then use a snifter bottle to hoover up the goods until I have it all.

At the end of this, take your gold stash, set it back in a pan or bowl with just enough water to submerge all the material, and run a magnet over it one last time. Only a tiny bit of the remaining heavy magnetite will come out. Take your magnetics from this stage and the previous, place into a small finishing pan. Pan those by hand later to make sure you didn't lift any gold (gold isn't magnetic, but it can get lifted up if the right piece of magnetite gets behind it), it's usually such a small amount that you are just taking two or three minutes to double check to see if there is that one fleck of gold that accidentally was lifted, but that material will be very heavy and dark... usually you can blow through it quickly in strong light and see that rare stray gold fleck pretty easily.

If you have more than 5% black sand bits in your gold at this point, you probably didn't give your miller table enough time to process and move out the heavies, or you didn't classify well enough. Miller tables are pretty efficient at leaving very little else but the gold.

My final step is drying the gold, which if you are going to do, simply let it sit after carefully draining, or use a DEDICATED pan, hot plate, whatever and heat it up slowly while outdoors. (For this, I use a cheapo electric camping hot plate that I just plug in outside and is solely for drying gold... I even use the same reserved spatula. Don't take any chances with mercury, don't assume your gold doesn't have mercury in it. Don't use that heated surface and stirring implement for anything else, or ever do this indoors - this process evaporates any mercury into the air and onto that heated surface, and trust me when I say nobody wants to experience the fun of neurological damage) Cook off the water and ensure completely dry, and you'll be left with fine gold and a few black heavies.

I tend to take these back, carefully spread them on a dry piece of paper, and so very gently blow across (not down!) to winnow out the remaining junk. The gold should barely move, the black sand bits should slowly skitter out to the sides until easily swept aside (black sand usually gets much lighter when not saturated with water because it is quite porous at the molecular level, where as on a relative scale gold retains its weight regardless if it is wet or dry). Then just fold the paper, dump into a container, and display/show off/weigh/hoard/bury/bathe in to your heart's content.

Sad Panda Notes/Advice that was requested:

1) What is the source of this pan? If it didn't come from the sluice, its tailings, not concentrates, and if all went perfect (never does, you'll always lose some gold, its just a question of how fine and if you can even see it) you won't find gold in them. The gold should be trapped in your sluice cons that you haven't cleaned out, even most of the fine stuff... if taken from anywhere after the sluice, all you are doing is processing tailings to check for losses. Not a bad practice for tuning your sluice, but also probably not what you want to use for your miller table to "learn" it the first time (or at all... generally I just quickly pan for losses and decide if they are acceptable in comparison to what was retained in the sluice, which I will have at least panned into a bin with first to provide comparison).

2) If you have no gold in those concentrates, then you won't be left with anything but a mess of clean dirt. It is difficult to tell if you have tuned the miller table right if you have no fine gold to see how it reacts on the table, but if the piles are moving like I described above, then the gold should "reveal" itself to you and won't be washing down much if at all.

3) Looking at your pan, it appears you have a very high amount of mica or pyrite flecks... tough to tell without being able to look closer... don't let those fool you into thinking you have gold, if they catch up into the water with a gentle "swirl" of the pan (like you do when going for a golden smile reveal) then they aren't the gold you are looking for... gold wants to pack down at the very bottom of the pan when using the right techniques, and only the super small flat stuff has a chance of floating, but if it does float, will only do so at the surface when sitting in a pan. (You can add a tiny drop of Jet-Dry to the pan to help with this.) Running this stuff on the miller table after classifying it well will get rid of all that light sparkly stuff that others get caught up looking at until they know their gold.

4) Change recirculating water regularly. As you process material, the finer particles of sand and clay will stay a part of the water column, and the effect of turbidity will start moving your gold in unwanted ways. Think of it as the water getting heavier, and thus having more force as it moves than if it was clean, even if you changed no other factors. I change recirculating water after a few hours as practical when using a miller table... if you can't see the bottom of your water reservoir stage, chances are turbidity is winning and you are risking losing finer gold. Usually in the stage where you are using a miller table, you'll be able to keep the water clean for a pretty decent amount of time, but you still don't want to use that water again for another cleanup session. Better to get all that stuff that has settled rinsed out completely, and start with clean water. (When recirculating with a sluice, different story. Generally you'll have to change water much more often as the material is much "dirtier.")

5) If you are having trouble panning down those last bits, use the "shake and knock" method. First get the material in the pan good and re-liquified, and angle it so the heavies will "shake" down to the corner of the bottom of the pan for a good minute or so. Then try and wash off the top layers a few times letting the water do the action, trusting the pan's riffles to catch the good stuff, and shaking between washes. When you have about half the material you have now (based on the provided photos), then you can start shaking the pan while "knocking" it against your other hand... the gold will start gathering towards the hand you are knocking against, as well as moving deeper into the corner of the pan. Don't move too fast or erratically... a single shake and knock per half second until you are more practiced, a good movement is repetitive and controlled. After doing this for about a minute, gently swirl the water in the direction opposite you were "knocking" towards... ie go clockwise if you knocked to your left hand, counterclockwise if knocked to the right hand. The swirl can take a little practice, but it should be just enough to lift the lighter stuff in the direction of the swirl, but the gold should reveal out while not getting moved too much (pretty soon too, because you are uncovering the "edge" you were knocking towards) and showing for "the golden smile." (Otherwise, once down to this little bit of material just run it on the miller table, it will do the same darn thing, in fact the swirl action works on the same principle as how miller tables work, you'll just have more material to process on the table... and the table will be cleaner about it in the end.)

I hope this helps and I didn't come off sounding patronizing... I'm pretty new to the club, so I can't always tell what level of experience each person has under their belt, and I tend to over explain things. And I tend to be really, really wordy as it is.

[CP]

Very nice work on the miller table rollcenter! Looks like it's going to do great.

For videos you might try uploading without any pictures in the post, you may have hit the upload limit with the pics and the video in the same post. Or if you have a youtube page you can link to the vids there also.

Excellent info Yoda! Better to be a little wordy (my wife says it's yappin' when I do it) Nice explanation and how you'd run it, totally makes sense to me.

I've not ever built one of these or used one for any long time periods....only tested with others who had one.
The concept is simple enough to understand but can be very tough to achieve correctly. Looks like you've done very well on this miller table project rollcenter. Yoda is correct in saying with concentrated material, that table is really going to shine. But remember this material was just sand from the drive for a test run.
In the future you'll actually be running the material through the sluice box first in the field. Running a sluice all day long will produce the "concentrated" material you'll then screen down to sizes and run over the miller table as described by Jason.

Another suggestion for catching tailings in the recirc set ups is to catch the tailings into a bucket or small pail within or right next to your water tub. Then let it run over into the tub for water at the pump, but yet containing most all of your tailings. We used a pipe just down a couple inches from the top of the bucket/pail to direct overflow. That makes clean out of tailing much easier for the bulk but as Jason said, you'll still have turbidity in the water which doesn't settle out unless the water stops flowing, keep you water as clean as possible by changing periodically.
Warmer water rather than colder also helps reduce that dang surface tension that can cause small gold to float off. With the jet dry and warm water kept on the clean side, that will help keep all that lovely flour gold you've worked so hard to catch with the cool projects.

Very cool project, work and input guys! Look forward to future updates/input!

[Yoda]

Also rollcenter (and I normally am not the type to offer to just drop on in with somebody I never met) I really love miller tables and I'm always looking for ideas and other things to build to screw up for myself... plus the weather hasn't exactly been cooperating and keeping me happily active like I would prefer. I started in a very similar boat as you a few years back and had to learn a lot of things on my own the harder way, some of which I'd be happy to prevent you from having to do the same.

I live only an hour out from Plattville (I'm right by Buckley AFB), and wouldn't mind heading your way with some lightly salted material for you to tune with so you can see how the gold is supposed to react on a miller table. I can help you practice your panning techniques as well, probably can get you into shape with that in less than an hour, and then the rest is practice, some more practice, served with a side of practice.

I'd get to meet another CP member out of it, as well as inspect your setup... you seem to have a fine hand for cobbling things together, which will serve you very well for prospecting/mining.

Provided you don't mind my 11 year old punk daughter hanging around if we do it, I can meet up any day of the week, any time during the day.

[rollcenter]

Also rollcenter (and I normally am not the type to offer to just drop on in with somebody I never met) I really love miller tables and I'm always looking for ideas and other things to build to screw up for myself... plus the weather hasn't exactly been cooperating and keeping me happily active like I would prefer. I started in a very similar boat as you a few years back and had to learn a lot of things on my own the harder way, some of which I'd be happy to prevent you from having to do the same.

I live only an hour out from Plattville (I'm right by Buckley AFB), and wouldn't mind heading your way with some lightly salted material for you to tune with so you can see how the gold is supposed to react on a miller table. I can help you practice your panning techniques as well, probably can get you into shape with that in less than an hour, and then the rest is practice, some more practice, served with a side of practice.

I'd get to meet another CP member out of it, as well as inspect your setup... you seem to have a fine hand for cobbling things together, which will serve you very well for prospecting/mining.

Provided you don't mind my 11 year old punk daughter hanging around if we do it, I can meet up any day of the week, any time during the day.

Man that info is what I was thinking I had my Miller table to steep to much water and everything went into the recirc box, I run the sluice below the Miller Table to catch all I lose along with a Pan with some media in it at the end of the sluice. All I had was Dawn Dish soap and used way to much Foam all over the Garage lol. I tell you what I will throw down some of the best BBQ for your wisdom and time. If you wanted to come out I know some is not gold but this fine is setting up in lines on the table along with the sands so some has to be gold I think lol. And in the pan it sets up in lines so I just am not sure about chucking it out tell I know for sure. I got this during the FLOOD of 2013 in Boulder just before a street sweeper came by. The gutter was nothing but black sand and fine gold specs. My cell is 720 491 8049. I am about 6 miles east of Platteville

[Yoda]

Sounds really great! We'll take a good close look at that material and your equipment, and see what is in it/what we need to tweak. I can't imagine this not being fun as heck.

First time you get with somebody who wants to show you what to look for, when they refine that knowledge to "this looks like this, that looks like that" right in front of your eyes, you always come out ready to start digging and moving any bit of dirt you come across. (And then you'll want to start working on identifying what quality material looks like... which is a lifetime of learning and fun!)

And you are right... there is a chance that flood might have carried some your way, 2013's flood cut more than a few new channels and the ilk further upstream from Boulder. The black sand should be encouraging, but as you have heard, black sand is usually around where gold is, but gold isn't always with the black sand. Flood effects and gold aren't always the easiest to predict (especially once it hits a city), but usually will be strongest where the gold is already known to be in the first place. Flood material from Boulder certainly should have a decent shot, and there are a few tricks to urban gold prospecting too. For instance, culvert pipes have that corrugation, which are for all sakes and purposes riffles, material taken directly from those pipes should be considered prime especially after a flood. (In fact, there are a few pro culvert cleaners out there who make a small secondary hobby/pay processing collected material at home, even without floods.) It's no guarantee, but anything that increases your chances of finding that gold is knowledge to keep in the back pocket.

I'll bring a little fine gold to be certain we have something to compare to, just to be safe. I'll also bring along a loupe (magnifier) too, so you can see up close why some of this material is bound and determined to fool people, and how to never get fooled again. (Yes, I am confident in that statement.) If you have a spare dropper bottle of some type, I'll set you up with a decent starter amount of Jet-Dry too (stuff is tough to find even around Denver sometimes, I finally just ordered a huge bottle of it from Amazon after getting fed up with not finding it... when used right, a small 3 or 4 oz bottle should easily last for a good long time)

If you want me to bring anything else if you don't have it (magnet, classifying screens, etc) just let me know, and I'll show you how to put those to use too, and what to look for where, when you want to get your own.

What is your schedule normally like during a week, so I can call to set up a visit with a day in mind?

And that food looks ridiculously good. I'm not above food bribes, not one bit.

[rollcenter]

Sounds really great! We'll take a good close look at that material and your equipment, and see what is in it/what we need to tweak. I can't imagine this not being fun as heck.

First time you get with somebody who wants to show you what to look for, when they refine that knowledge to "this looks like this, that looks like that" right in front of your eyes, you always come out ready to start digging and moving any bit of dirt you come across. (And then you'll want to start working on identifying what quality material looks like... which is a lifetime of learning and fun!)

And you are right... there is a chance that flood might have carried some your way, 2013's flood cut more than a few new channels and the ilk further upstream from Boulder. The black sand should be encouraging, but as you have heard, black sand is usually around where gold is, but gold isn't always with the black sand. Flood effects and gold aren't always the easiest to predict (especially once it hits a city), but usually will be strongest where the gold is already known to be in the first place. Flood material from Boulder certainly should have a decent shot, and there are a few tricks to urban gold prospecting too. For instance, culvert pipes have that corrugation, which are for all sakes and purposes riffles, material taken directly from those pipes should be considered prime especially after a flood. (In fact, there are a few pro culvert cleaners out there who make a small secondary hobby/pay processing collected material at home, even without floods.) It's no guarantee, but anything that increases your chances of finding that gold is knowledge to keep in the back pocket.

I'll bring a little fine gold to be certain we have something to compare to, just to be safe. I'll also bring along a loupe (magnifier) too, so you can see up close why some of this material is bound and determined to fool people, and how to never get fooled again. (Yes, I am confident in that statement.) If you have a spare dropper bottle of some type, I'll set you up with a decent starter amount of Jet-Dry too (stuff is tough to find even around Denver sometimes, I finally just ordered a huge bottle of it from Amazon after getting fed up with not finding it... when used right, a small 3 or 4 oz bottle should easily last for a good long time)

If you want me to bring anything else if you don't have it (magnet, classifying screens, etc) just let me know, and I'll show you how to put those to use too, and what to look for where, when you want to get your own.


And that food looks ridiculously good. I'm not above food bribes, not one bit.

What is your schedule normally like during a week, so I can call to set up a visit with a day in mind?
Well Yoda I look forward to your visit and your daughter can play with the chickens, I live on 400 acre farm I really only have the weekend if all heck dos not break out. I miss a lot of calls out here I run a lot of heavy equipment. As for the Boulder thing my company has a contract to clean up a lot of flood damage in Boulder Canyon, We are thinking of sending our Vac Truck loads out here to process so I need to get it going. They clean out colverts I have the basic stuff but all the screens Call me anytime in the day leave a message If I cant answer. I get up 4:30 ever day rain or shine. Might have to start a trummel build next

[Yoda]

Just wanted to let you know I haven't forgotten about this. This weekend has turned out unusually busy for me; family birthday party and the ilk to attend to.

I also got a bit of the builder bug in me, and started on my 3rd miller table. There should be no issues with uneven surfaces with this one: I found some honed slate. It'll be a couple more days until its finished, but I should start posting details soon, and assuming Cara knows where the video camera is hidden, I am planning on making a "how to use" video. (And assuming the old concentrates I still have contain some serious ultrafines still hidden in them ... I'll bet they do.)

Hopefully next weekend shapes up a bit better, we'll talk soon!

[rollcenter]

[quote name='Yoda' date='May 30 2015, 10:01 AM' post='38702']
Just wanted to let you know I haven't forgotten about this. This weekend has turned out unusually busy for me; family birthday party and the ilk to attend to.

I also got a bit of the builder bug in me, and started on my 3rd miller table. There should be no issues with uneven surfaces with this one: I found some honed slate. It'll be a couple more days until its finished, but I should start posting details soon, and assuming Cara knows where the video camera is hidden, I am planning on making a "how to use" video. (And assuming the old concentrates I still have contain some serious ultrafines still hidden in them ... I'll bet they do.)

Hopefully next weekend shapes up a bit better, we'll talk soon!
[/quote
You sound like me I got a new project going today a 1.1 Million Gallon Emergency Water Storage System. Hope to have the walls up in 2 days its 125 feet across lol. So if you make it out you will see this tank set up on the weekend I think we will have it up tell next friday as we test some stuff.This is the tank walls getting dropped off at my house.



As you can see they are flat but we bend them into round as we set them and then put a bladder inside and bam you have 1 million gallon storage just think how many we will sell in California!!!!! The next 1 is over 2 million gallons,