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Prospecting Australia

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It's just as well Mrs M does more fossicking than cooking because the oven now only has two shelves where before there were three :lol:

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Now I just have to wait for her to get home so that she can get it dirty. Hopefully it's a pleasant surprize ;)
 
Today was one of those days, I had visitors for an hour or so this morning and then another friend dropped in this afternoon. It's nice to have people drop in but it stuffs up your work plans.

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I decided to go ahead and make the manual crank because if I don't have we'll run into one of those people who are just sent to spoil your day. I put a little piece of jarrah in the lathe and then soaked it in lanolin to hopefully give it an extended life.

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It's not much but it'd be difficult to work without it. The thread on the end of the crank is the same as the electric motor connection.
 
Last trip away after being struck by the cow we had trouble maintaining air pressure in the trailer airbags. Today I attempted to sort that out.

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The aluminium tank has a working pressure of 220 Bar. It's only inflated to 7 Bar and the air bags are regulated to 2.5 Bar. I had another tyre monitor so the tank pressure is monitored from the cab.
 
Rockhunter62 said:
Hi Phil, if that guage is going to be on there fulltime I can't see it lasting with all the rocks bouncing around.

Cheers

Doug

You're right there Doug. I had to cut the rope rail to get the bottle in so I'll use that to create some protection for the gauge and pipe fittings. I've got nearly two weeks to tidy up a bundle of jobs before we head out. That pressure regulator and gauge bought from an Australian supplier were less than $20 delivered. I know we don't like all the Chinese imports but they do drive our prices down.
 
Rockhunter62 said:
Hi Phil, if that guage is going to be on there fulltime I can't see it lasting with all the rocks bouncing around.

Cheers

Doug

Even on the outside of the trailer as it looks like to be placed, it looks like a disaster!!
Yup, move the fittings out of the way, but not near people????
 
Simmo said:
Rockhunter62 said:
Hi Phil, if that guage is going to be on there fulltime I can't see it lasting with all the rocks bouncing around.

Cheers

Doug

Even on the outside of the trailer as it looks like to be placed, it looks like a disaster!!
Yup, move the fittings out of the way, but not near people????

Don't worry Simmo it will be well protected from stones and branches. I started out working on it this morning but I crawled out of bed a bit late after reading during the night so never got too far. Then it was time to pick up the post.

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The new detector turned up on toll and the new pulley for the dryblower turned up as well. I'd really liked to have unpacked the detector and gone for a swing but Mrs M will be home before the end of the week and I've not got any worthwhile gold from the dryblower since she left so that one won out.

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I've moved to this lease close to home because we're heading for Coolgardie shortly and I'll want to bring everything home before we leave. Somebody stockpiled all this dirt before I got the lease. There was thousands of tonnes there when I pegged the lease but the shire dipped into it to rebuild roads after last summer's heavy rain.

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I did some brief trials here but the big rocks gave me trouble. Since the recent adjustments I've made to the dryblower it seems to be a lot better. Add to that I placed the machine on a slight slope so that the classifier was falling at a greater angle. Of course that only works on one side because it made the riffle trays closer to horizontal slowing the flow. I wound down the amount of dirt being delivered to prevent flooding the riffles.

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It resulted in a very slow output so I only processed one pile of dirt in the time that I previously did two. About 50% of this dirt is rock and 50% is very fine dust. Our previous trials showed that it had gold so hopefully this afternoon's effort will pay off. I'll run it through the sluice in the morning.
 
I'm not the best man to have on the pan.

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I battled to keep the gold in the pan today. I could see some escaping but it was moving with the surrounding sand. I've panned into another pan so Mrs M can try to get what I missed later. It was light and flaky so I think quite a bit would have gone in the Gold Rat sluice. The magnet picked it up with the black sand too.

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It's very dirty gold. I started to pick the red bits out until I realised they are gold but just coated in red stain. This was from 3hrs on the dryblower so a little better but not good.
 
I got out there by 1:00pm today. My timing was bad because the wind had just decided to change, and change, and change. Wherever I put the dryblower I had the wind and dust in my face. I'm fine in the cab but I feel for my filters. We even had a willy-willy right on the spot where I was trying to dodge the dust.

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I'm still working the same pile so the big rocks are troublesome. They come bounding down onto the front tyres and then wack into the dryblower. Lots of minor damage but I guess it'll get more before it's done.

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After every one or two bucket loads I have to push the rocks aside. They hold up the classifier too but there's a bit of gold in the dust between them so I'll keep loading them up.

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Three and a half hours today although I spent a bit of that time dragging the machine about. It's getting better as I learn a bit more. What I need now is a little tacho so that I can record the engine speed at the time when it's performing at its best. Then next time I won't have to guess the setup. Before I replaced the wobble shaft pulley I was just running the Honda flat out but now I need to know where to set the throttle for the best performance.
 
Funny i just noticed the drill bit also, hehehehehe, we just cleaned out some more shed ***** and i gave away a full set of morse taper drill bits and and a maybe a couple dozen or more tip tools some with the small removeable tips to my gunsmith mate plus 4 pakts of tips all left over from our brake business many moons ago in another life.
 
rustyhooks said:
Funny i just noticed the drill bit also, hehehehehe, we just cleaned out some more shed ***** and i gave away a full set of morse taper drill bits and and a maybe a couple dozen or more tip tools some with the small removeable tips to my gunsmith mate plus 4 pakts of tips all left over from our brake business many moons ago in another life.

Yes Rusty, I gave my pedestal drills and drill bits away too but life must go on and sometimes it takes some twists and turns we don't see coming. I left the lathe with the tenant of my old workshop too but I had to repossess it to build the dryblower. I'd done with a life of building things but this time it's for pleasure not for money. Mrs M sees it differently of course, she counts the grams and calculates the value :lol:

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Today we melted the first 2 oz off the dryblower in a potato. It came down quite a bit with the black sands and whatever went in the flux. We're down to 55.6g of ugly looking gold so we'll purify it further shortly when we get our act together.

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No doubt we'll lose a bit more with impurities but I'm happy with that :)
 

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