Seperating black sand and fine gold from small stones.

[rc62burke]

I've quite a few pieces of silver-coloured gold from NE Tassie. One of my spots near Lisle produces nearly 1/4 silver-coloured pieces and two-coloured pieces. I suspect mercury as well.

Hey mfdes
Mate could it be PGE's down your way ???? as I got a few specks at Doctors Rocks.
cheers
Lee

 

[user 1769]

Hi Lee, I originally wondered if they were, too.
They look nothing like the Adamsfield osmiridium, though: they're soft like gold, and there is no mention of PGEs from the Lisle area in any old report. I'm more leaning to gold. I'm sending some to Ralph Bottrill, mineralogist at Mineral Resources Tasmania, to find out.

 

[HeadsUp]

I have had the same problem when processing concentrates in the field from my high banker

Large amounts of dense heavy ironstone want to stay in the pan and ultra thin flakes of gold keep washing over close to the edge of the pan

I don't have a solution other than stopping and snuffing up those very thin gold flakes as i go or taking the concentrates home to put them through 1/8 , 1/16 , 1/32 , 1/64 sieves before using a blue bowl

I do sometimes use a 1/4 or 1/8" sieve on top of my pan when doing concentrates in the field and this both speeds up panning and allows me to sort through the sieve by eye to pull out any little pickers bit I still get lots of those heavy little 1/8" ironstone chunks in the pan .

People here with more experience than me are sure to have a better solution

 

[Drbean]

Cut a coke bottle in half drill holes around the neck a bout
two inches .swirl in a small container of water .Walah take lid
off gold in lid.basically a small version of a Nelson seperator.Dr

 

[Drbean]

Cut a coke bottle in half drill holes around the neck a bout
two inches .swirl in a small container of water .Walah take lid
off gold in lid.basically a small version of a Nelson seperator.Dr

 

[HeadsUp]

The 'silvery' gold is most likely mercury coated - not uncommon to find it like this due to the common use of mercury to trap and amalgamate gold during the 1800's and early 1900's.

mercury also appears naturally in a few parts of australia , it wasnt all introduced by human beans

tried looking for the map link for resource locations but need to come back to that one sorry

 

[Guest]

Are you guys digging down to bedrock in that creek? Looks pretty shallow if you are. Just looking for some pointers as to how far down people are digging as I've been out a couple of times with the pan here in S.A. but found nothing

Cheers
Paul

 

[Beagleboy]

Are you guys digging down to bedrock in that creek? Looks pretty shallow if you are. Just looking for some pointers as to how far down people are digging as I've been out a couple of times with the pan here in S.A. but found nothing

Cheers
Paul

The bedrock is very shallow in this creek. We scraped the stuff out of a crevice with a shovel and than used a yabby pump to clean it out. I would have panned a half a bucket worth of material. Its all flood gold.
The gold will be on the bottom of the crevice so dig deep.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the info Beagleboy, seems I'm not digging deep enough, I'm only new to this, so please bear with me

Cheers,
Paul