Dollying gold from qaurtz.

[reefer]

hullo all been a while since i last posted but thems the breaks..Just been sittin back enjoying everyone elses posts..hehe. here's my problem. Done a hell of a lot of sluicing ..panning etc in my time, but lately i've been collecting gold bearing qaurtz and had a heavy duty dolly made up..so far so good.. the thing is without using MERCURY.. HOW DO YOU EXTRACT THE FINE GOLD FROM THE CRUSHINGS.. i'm hoping that it is possible to just run it through the pan..years of experience has me able to pan down to Very fine yella.. but i am just trying to cover as many bases as i can. Any help in this regard would be much appreciated..cheers to all Rossco.

 

[beno86]

Is a blue bowl ideal for this?

Only other way ive seen is people using home made flour gold sluices on Youtube or those extremely pricey shaker tables. You could put the whole lot into a furnace

 

[Colmaca]

I say if you can't see it forget it pan the ground around .

 

[blayke]

depends on how fine.....try a water table....seen some very nice ones made with a slab of marble, some undercoat and some chalboard paint....works wonders on fine gold

 

[reefer]

Blayke..could you elaborate a little on this table arrangement.. aah might not be able to get a slab of marble in a hurry..i just don't quite 'get' how it is set up or anything this crush'in gold bearing quartz is all new to me and they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks...my tonue is hang'in out and my tail is wagging furiously...aahh woof woof..

 

[AtomRat]

I have not done it, but from the vids I have seen, you need to make sure it is as much of a slurry as possible, completely crushed down to baby powder pretty much and run it down a fine carpet sluicebox. After the sluicebox cleanup, panning is still needed to extract the gold out, and then either use mercury ( its fine as long as you know what you are doing, and retorting ) or you can actually use Borax as a mercury substitute. Check that out on the youtube link below.

Another thing you can do with the cleanup from the carpet sluice is semi refine the gold and remove impurities using first 50/50 mix of hydrochloric acid (HCl+H20) and hydrogen peroxide(H202, from any pharmacy). ( No, not the hair cream peroxide ). This will dissolve some of the minerals away like tin, copper and rust out the iron in it. You can then use Hydrofluoric Acid (HF+H20) to eat and soften up that quartz, but finding this chemical may be difficult to buy. BUT if you have a fluorite rock sitting about, dump it into some sulfuric acid and you will have HF acid. The last step would be more difficult, and that is dissolving it in Aqua Regia and precipitating out the gold powder using Sodium Metabisulphate or similar. Then smelt the powder in a crucible.

I am guessing you want to keep away from dangerous chemicals so the latter may not be up to your taste, let alone the long process, but to me it is safer than cyanide extraction via carbon and electrolysis.

Personally I would keep it simple and use what I had suggested first with carpet and Borax, youtube vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Sawj0HyF0

Hope this helps, sorry for the scientific mumbo jumbo, I'm a kind of at home hobby Mad Scientist.

 

[Hunting the yellow]

I do the same thing as well but ive been doing it for about 5 years now I pan out samples and collect the bigger gold with tweezers then get a sniffer bottle and suck up all the fine gold and put it into a small ice cream container and keep doing this until I get a bucket full of black sand and fine gold then I stick it into my blue bowl witch isn't blue in colour by the way anyway I stick in all in with borax and a small amount of soap leave it run for about 10 to 20mins then all im left with is a lot of fine gold and very little black sands

ps ive just panned all my rock crushing's in a big old bath outside I think ive crushed about 1 ton now for just under 3oz of gold but processing that fine gold is a real struggle for me and anyone I reckon. but if you could ask a current mining company to treat it for you in vic and had say 1 ton of dirt for them to process it might be worth your while asking if they can for you

 

[jethro]

Hey there Reefer.
Ive recently started to repan the tailing sands from my rod mill crushings from a few years back that I collected and kept. I have discovered that I am recovering almost as much gold on this second pass as I got on the initial panning I did at the time. I have switched over to a small 8 inch black plastic pan and I am not panning down to below a couple of tablespoons of concentrates before I empty the load into a poverty pot for further concentration & eventual smelting. I am looking at building a small Wilfley table as I want to be able to put a complete small plant into the back of a ute so I can go bush and pick over the old dumps & process the stone without worrying the neighbours with the noise from the rod mill.

 

[Ag Man]

I read somewhere you can make one of them tables with water running over them & either paint it with blackboard paint or line it with very fine wet'n'dry sandpaper.
I'm going to give it a go as I'm fairly fast at panning but I haven't got much patience to get the very last of the fine sands out. One of these tables of a blue bowl might be the go...

 

[reefer]

Huntin the Yellow,AgMan and Jethro......Fellas thanks for your input..but i've seriously given up on the rock crush'n business. i think the (ore) i was processing was bereft of any gold at all..bit of a blue on my part for not I.D...ing suitable stuff for crushing. thought it would ok as there appeared to be gold traces over the surface of much of the stone. I'll leave off with crushing till i come across more likely material. Once again thanks for taking time to reveal your techniques and practices..but i.. " I think I'll stick ta work'n the gravels"..hehe cheers Rossco

 

[Goldtarget]

The table you guys are referring to is called a Miller table for anyone wanting a closer look. Plenty of vids and some members have built their own under diy

 

[dwt]

I use a gold rocket, probarbly outta date now, but they work a treat,
http://goldrevenue.com/gold-digging...or-platinum-gold-prospecting-panning-rotapan/
Usually after i have cleaned up as much as i can with a clean up sluice, whats left goes through this machine, clean water and a tiny amount of truckwash, and im collecting all the gold that i can see.

 

[Dart70ca]

I have very little experience and found panning to be time consuming and a bit hit-and-miss for me. The gold I have is pretty fine; from dust specks to small flecks under 1mm diameter.

After reading a bunch and watching guys on YouTube, I built a miller table from a discarded double-glazed window. I cut some dado grooves in 1x6 lumber I had lying around and screwed the ends together to frame the glass on 3 sides. Put in the glass with and screwed another piece to the front flush with the top of the table to allow water to flow out. Took everything apart and sealed it up with some clear polyurethane I had and painted the window with some chalkboard paint from Home Depot. Reassembled it all after everything had dried and sealed it in with a bead of silicone caulk.
For adjustable legs I used 1/4" carriage bolts and those nuts with the spurs on them that you hammer into a predrilled hole in wood. We call them tee-nuts here. I used 3. Two in front and one in the middle in back. The 2 in the front corners adjust level across the table and the one in back is just for adjusting tilt-angle from front to back. Fiddling with this one and adjusting water flow are pretty much all you have to do to get gold out of this thing.
For a spray-rail I drilled a few .1" holes in a piece of PVC plumbing pipe and attached it at the top back end with some U-clamps from the electrical aisle at Home Depot. I run this off the hose-bib in my back yard for now.
To help flatten out the water film, I chose to use what i call an 'air-sponge'; it's a sponge that really doesn't hold water, just allows it to pass through like a filter. The stuff I got was a product from Home Depot made to stuff into roof-gutters to keeps leaves and stuff from plugging your drains. Simple and effective.
Lastly, you should use something to minimize the surface-tension in the water film. I use a product called Jet-Dri. It's a detergent additive you put in your dishwasher to keep spots off your water glasses. Since i'm running a total-loss system on the water right now, i just squirt some in the sponge once in a while.
Next thing I will add to this is a cheap flow-meter to the water inlet so I can get some idea of which flow-rate and table angle combination catches the most gold of a given size. I don't have an actual 'classifier' yet, but I used a fine-mesh soil-screen from the Daiso store that they sell for Bonsai work. I figure those meshes have about a 1/32" opening or a bit less. Just under a millimeter, let's say.
My window was about 16x22" and it's seems fine. You have to reach across this thing a lot to brush the concentrates loose and to pick up gold so I wouldn't make it much more than 20-24" wide. I rarely find gold more than 2" down from where I dropped the concentrate so I think you could make it shorter, though the traditional ones are quite long.
I use a fine 2cm wide brush from the local Daiso Japanese Dollar-Store. I think it should be as fine a brush as you can get, like a makeup brush or something. You shouldn't touch the table as oil from your skin can mess it up. A snuffer-bottle to pick up the bits of gold completes it.

 

[reefer]

Wonderful post Dart70ca.a clear and succinct and very informing..and at a budget price as well...hehe Seriously mate,thanks for taking the time to share that with us..it's inspired me to not give up...just yet... on chasing it to where its payable, then i'll look at something along the lines as you have outlined... good on ya mate!
hehe seriously ,kind regards ..........reefer...oh n' heres to James McGill and the Independent Californian Rangers who stood with us at EUREKA.CHEERS Rossco.

 

[Dart70ca]

Thank you sir. I tried to make it short and clear but I guess a picture would have been better

The reason I started reading this thread is that the next little project I'm going to make is a dolly for crushing promising looking samples. I have one of those pneumatic hammers like mechanics use and am going to cut the end off one of the chisels and weld on a steel slug for use as a hammer. Section of pipe with a plate welded on the end for the 'mortar' part. Seems to be the cheapest and most effective solution going, cheaper even than a mortar and pestle. In the future I might get a cordless hammer-drill and use that for field-work. The pneumatic hammer is only about $15 Can. at the local cheap tool store (Chinese stuff) and a spare chisel for it is only $2. I'm am machinist by trade and can weld good enough to make that so not too much of an investment.

Keith

 

[Dart70ca]

Pics of the miller table and dolly I made. The dolly is pretty crude looking but should get better with use Bought a surplus store chisel for $2 and tig welded a chunk of flame hardened 1040 on there after cutting the chisel part off.

 

[thedigger]

You would be better off with a crow bar,too heavy and make the old wrist sore.

The Digger

 

[HeadsUp]

Pics of the miller table and dolly I made. The dolly is pretty crude looking but should get better with use Bought a surplus store chisel for $2 and tig welded a chunk of flame hardened 1040 on there after cutting the chisel part off.

regarding the air chisel hammer you made , i advise guys to try and preheat the end of the chisel if they stick or mig weld it

the chisel is hardened steel and if you weld without preheat they snap off within 5 minutes from embrittlement in the heat affected zone

the way you did it with TIG is great because you get some preheat in there before you lay down any filler rod and the heating is a bit slower.

an even better way to do them however is to soften the chisel end by annealing first before welding

annealing steel requires a different process to suit the material type , i will try and get a metallurgy spec for chisels and provide the procedure for annealing , its opposite what you do to anneal copper

 

[Dart70ca]

I guess I'll find out, but we hardness tested it in the shop and, while the core was certainly pretty hard, the consensus was that this cheapo was case-hard. TIG puts WAY less heat into the piece than MIG or stick, plus we slow-cooled it in an insulating blanket after. Doing it at home, I would definitely pre-heat and slow cool in a bucket of garden lime.
If this one snaps off, it'll be down inside the dolly pot so not dangerous, and we'll just weld the damned thing back on
Good point, though, should have mentioned it myself I guess.