Fine and flake gold recovery Options

[nuggetstosmall]

Whats the best way to recover flake and super fine gold?? Since going to the Arkansas River and finding lots of fine and flake gold, its like herding chickens to recover it. So was wondering how to recover it?? Any help would be great.

[CP]

I like the analogy, herdin' chickens So true.

Not knowing any of the processes used so far to get your concentrate, a good technique that helps with Colorado's well know "fine gold" is to get that water tension down at anytime possible during any of the operations from start to finish pan. We've got some tips on this for panning on the plans and tips page if needed.
We also use the same technique (small soap seep set up) when sluicing, highbanking or dredging too. Works well to help catch all that fine stuff without ruffled feathers so to speak.

This pan in the pic was a days highbanking, then the concentrates classified and run through a modified mini sluice recirc set up and 1 final pan to pan out.
You can see there is a nice amount of the very fine colors. It's still a flippin' pain to pan down and get clean though. Mag seperation works well as Ryan said, we use a spring loaded magnent in the pan very gently without putting it to the bottom. Just try to keep the magnent hoovering above the well spread out (thin) black sand in water, the magnent will pull the magnetic paritcles up to the magnent.

If you use the blue bowl, Swizz did an awesome write up on how to make the best of that unit too.
Swizz's blue bowl write up

Good luck herdin' the chickens.



This post has been edited by ColoradoProspector: May 18 2010, 05:59 PM

Reason for edit: to add link