mudgee hunter said:
Central Victoria mudgee hunter .
Cheers
goldrat
Fine Gold Recovery information and questions
- Thread starter markhowl59
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Central Victoria mudgee hunter .
Cheers
goldrat
Jackthehound
Norm
I'll throw another in the hat, a Gold Cube.
Thanks for the info. i didnt know these machines existed. After reading a bit about them and the prices. The blue bowl or millers table are in my price range. Most of the gold in the pan is very small. you can only see it when its wet in the pan. Theres a about twenty specs in each pan. The millers table, from various reviews said that was the best at getting the finest gold. Is there much difference between the blue bowl or millers table. Which one would be the fastest to classify the cons.
Generally i find a miller table to be faster than a blue bowl, though I've only used DIY versions of either. A good miller table can be made with a sheet of glass and some chalkboard paint by the way. Both need classification, a kitchen sieve will work in a pinch, but the finer the better.
20 pieces of flour would be barely a trail in the pan, are you working surface layers or digging down to bedrock/clay layers? In any case I wouldn't work that with a pan, a sluice if you have sufficient water flow would do alright though if you can't get onto anything better. Those sort of values are best approached as a bulk processing exercise, but are sometimes a good indicator of better values nearby.
I'd poke around nearby and see if you can't pick up a decent tail in the pan, or a few pickers, then work there if you're only using a pan. Go deeper if you can, and work out to deeper, faster moving areas toward the centre of the flow. It takes a lot of force to move gold, remember it's lazy and doesn't want to go far, so unless you're on top of the source the larger bits and the bulk of the fines will be where there's enough flow to to put them there.
20 pieces of flour would be barely a trail in the pan, are you working surface layers or digging down to bedrock/clay layers? In any case I wouldn't work that with a pan, a sluice if you have sufficient water flow would do alright though if you can't get onto anything better. Those sort of values are best approached as a bulk processing exercise, but are sometimes a good indicator of better values nearby.
I'd poke around nearby and see if you can't pick up a decent tail in the pan, or a few pickers, then work there if you're only using a pan. Go deeper if you can, and work out to deeper, faster moving areas toward the centre of the flow. It takes a lot of force to move gold, remember it's lazy and doesn't want to go far, so unless you're on top of the source the larger bits and the bulk of the fines will be where there's enough flow to to put them there.
Im using a walbanker. And panning the cons from it. This was my first outing with the banker, only used it for a hour. When i panned the cons i found a few peices, then i repanned the cons and keep finding more peices that i had missed. Ive only been panning a few times. And it shows what I've been loosing. The place im working is a creek with fine gravel and sand. no black sand or clay. Volcanic baslt about 4 foot down. I think what im picking up is the tailings from the old battery in the bush up stream.
Keep practicing with the pan then. Use your pan to sample rather than a banker, or run a bucket through the banker for a larger sample, an hour is a lot of shovelling for a little gold. If the creek is mostly fine gravel/sand then you can try using a probe to find dips in the bedrock or patches of larger stone which might indicate drop out zones.
As much as things like miller tables and bankers speed up your recovery you have to be digging in the right spot in the first place, which means sampling before you spend an hour shovelling. Lots of different ways to sample, but the general idea is to work a small but representative amount from likely looking spots to see if they're worthwhile, before you spend energy and time digging.
Edit: if you think it's coming from around the battery then I'd try moving closer to that, even working the ground underneath if you can.
As much as things like miller tables and bankers speed up your recovery you have to be digging in the right spot in the first place, which means sampling before you spend an hour shovelling. Lots of different ways to sample, but the general idea is to work a small but representative amount from likely looking spots to see if they're worthwhile, before you spend energy and time digging.
Edit: if you think it's coming from around the battery then I'd try moving closer to that, even working the ground underneath if you can.
What size sieves would i need. I did some research on this forum from past posts. Most people seemed to be using a size 1/4 and a 1/8 inch mesh sieves. Is it easier to knock a couple up or buy them. Can you get the sieves to fit a twenty litre bucket. Sorry to bombard you with questions. I feel like a kid at school. !. Also Ill pan my way up to the old battery and see what the creek has hidden for me. It would be good sight to see the old girl working again. :Y:
You can pick up classifiers to fit 20 litre buckets at most prospecting shops and on ebay, from memory they're 11 inches round if you want to fab them yourself. There's also plans to make a sieve from a bucket and some mesh floating around on PA somewhere, probably in the diy sub forum. For sampling I'd suggest a 1/4 inch sieve. I usually use a half inch classifier just because it speeds things up a bit, but if you're looking for fine gold specifically then it's probably worth the extra time to increase your chances of an accurate sample. Sieving down to an 1/8th or less at the creek is possible but the smaller you go the longer it takes both to classify and pan it so it's a bit of a tradeoff, better recovery v. a higher time cost. The same thing applies to your banker by the way, reducing the size of the material passing through will increase the efficiency of capture on smaller gold.
A 50 mesh classifier (kitchen sieve pretty much) should be suitable for cleaning up concentrates, provided you remember to check for larger pieces. They will settle in the bottom of the sieve so if you're careful you can flip it over much the same way they do when looking for gemstones. It takes a bit of practice though so until you get the hang of it pan them anyway,without the fine sand panning can be done very quickly anyway. Running a magnet over your cons will likely reduce the amount you have to deal with too, even if there's not a huge amount of black sand.
Good luck with exploring the battery, there's a good chance a quite a bit of colour was spilled if it was in operation for a while.
A 50 mesh classifier (kitchen sieve pretty much) should be suitable for cleaning up concentrates, provided you remember to check for larger pieces. They will settle in the bottom of the sieve so if you're careful you can flip it over much the same way they do when looking for gemstones. It takes a bit of practice though so until you get the hang of it pan them anyway,without the fine sand panning can be done very quickly anyway. Running a magnet over your cons will likely reduce the amount you have to deal with too, even if there's not a huge amount of black sand.
Good luck with exploring the battery, there's a good chance a quite a bit of colour was spilled if it was in operation for a while.
Thanks everone for your imput. Bend im now making a bucket sieve 1/2 inch and a 1/4 inch. Now ill put that money iv saved towards a bigger back pac so i can still get up bush with the moto.
I have an industrial portable centrifugal concentrator - similar to a Knelson but can run on dirty water - which gets fine gold down to 3 micron in size (panning usually only gets down to about 70 micron). Very effective with black sand. Happy to team up in exchange for good locations to run it.
You seem to be struggling a bitOccasional_panner said:
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xcvator said:You seem to be struggling a bitOccasional_panner said:
I always struggle mate. Blue bowl is a ripper though.
Gday carter. Where abouts are you located. Im near coffs harbour. I've just about finished building a miller table. But Im interested in your centrifugal concentrator, could you post a pic of it. Years ago here they mined the beaches for rutile and found alot of gold mixed in. My old friend used to work for the beach mining company. I think they used the same principle as your concentrator probley much larger. Its still behind the dunes, just about rusted away to nothing now. He said once they emptied the concentrator he would pan the cons at the bottom. He has a pickle bottle full of gold. The biggest nugget is just over two ounces. Im only new to prospecting, still learning each time i venture out. The water up here is crystal clear not much clay or black sand. Mainly gravel.
hers a pick of one creek iv been looking at.
