Moneybox
Philip & Sandra Box
Panning can be therapeutic or frustrating. Perhaps that depends on your ability to do it well or in my case I find that some days it just doesn’t work for me.
I can agitate the pan to get the gold down to the bottom. I can create gentle enough flow in and out of the pan to get the blondes flowing over the side. I can even get down to that point where just about everything is either grey lead, black sand, silver mercury coated gold or just beautiful gold itself.
It’s at that point where I find it frustrating. I can get the strong rare earth magnet and lift the heavy black iron particles but when I take a good look, in between those particles of sand there are specks of gold. What do you do, discard this fine gold?
Then there’s the larger bits of iron like 2mm pebbles. I can work them to one side, flush them out or slide them over the edge of the pan with my finger. The problem I have with that is that some of them are actually little species, partly gold. Do you just discard them as just too much trouble for what they are worth?
Then I get to the lead. Much of it is spherical, mostly shotgun pellets but some is formed by the working of the concentrates earlier in the process. That work also creates the thin flakes of lead that must have been crushed between a rock and a hard place but whatever the form I find the lead difficult to remove.
I have a few options and I’ve tried each of them.
Now the reason for this little story is to explain my option 5 that I took recently. I did the usual and removed the clean gold but I sent some of the black sand to the refinery. Now you must understand that I knew this was not just black sand but the fine gold as well that had passed through the tealeaf sieve. It just looked like a couple of little pill bottles of sand but it was heavy.
I don’t know the exact weight of the gold but the big gold button was 44.8g. However, it was contaminated with lead, silver and whatever while having a gold content of 88%. I don’t know the weight of the small pieces of gold but all up weight of the gold and sand was 270g.
If we take a generous stab at it and call the gold 70g then that would leave 200g of sand. I got paid on 150g of gold and silver. If you take off the 70g of gold then that 200g of sand paid me 80g of gold with a little silver.
The essence of the story is, don’t throw your black sand away. If you are very good with the pan and can pan all that sand over the side than I suggest you catch it to process on another day.
I can agitate the pan to get the gold down to the bottom. I can create gentle enough flow in and out of the pan to get the blondes flowing over the side. I can even get down to that point where just about everything is either grey lead, black sand, silver mercury coated gold or just beautiful gold itself.
It’s at that point where I find it frustrating. I can get the strong rare earth magnet and lift the heavy black iron particles but when I take a good look, in between those particles of sand there are specks of gold. What do you do, discard this fine gold?
Then there’s the larger bits of iron like 2mm pebbles. I can work them to one side, flush them out or slide them over the edge of the pan with my finger. The problem I have with that is that some of them are actually little species, partly gold. Do you just discard them as just too much trouble for what they are worth?
Then I get to the lead. Much of it is spherical, mostly shotgun pellets but some is formed by the working of the concentrates earlier in the process. That work also creates the thin flakes of lead that must have been crushed between a rock and a hard place but whatever the form I find the lead difficult to remove.
I have a few options and I’ve tried each of them.
- I can spend a lot of time slowly removing all the impurities until I see just gold.
- I can put it into a crucible with a fair dose of borax for flux and melt it down. The result is usually pretty good but to remove the lead is another process. I have to place my newly formed button into a cupel, add some more lead and keep it molten long enough for the cupel to absorb all of the lead oxide. This usually gives me a bright shiny gold button but the whole process can take hours.
- I usually do my best to pick the lead out and extract most of the black sand with the magnet. That get’s me to what you see in the photo. Next I place it into a white breakfast bowl and dry it over the toaster as in the photo. From here I put it through the tealeaf sieve which is just the right mesh to remove the majority of the black sand.
- Another option is to chemically extract the gold in a way that I cannot explain here on this site…. just to say that it’s effective, quick and efficient although controversial.
Now the reason for this little story is to explain my option 5 that I took recently. I did the usual and removed the clean gold but I sent some of the black sand to the refinery. Now you must understand that I knew this was not just black sand but the fine gold as well that had passed through the tealeaf sieve. It just looked like a couple of little pill bottles of sand but it was heavy.
I don’t know the exact weight of the gold but the big gold button was 44.8g. However, it was contaminated with lead, silver and whatever while having a gold content of 88%. I don’t know the weight of the small pieces of gold but all up weight of the gold and sand was 270g.
If we take a generous stab at it and call the gold 70g then that would leave 200g of sand. I got paid on 150g of gold and silver. If you take off the 70g of gold then that 200g of sand paid me 80g of gold with a little silver.
The essence of the story is, don’t throw your black sand away. If you are very good with the pan and can pan all that sand over the side than I suggest you catch it to process on another day.
