Catch-It Water Table Review
Jan. 12, 2010
By Cindy Peratt
The Rock Doc
Nathrop, Colorado
First let me just say that Colorado prospectors, by necessity, are innovators and either are, or are learning to be, not only patient but committed. I say this because in comparison to prospectors in Alaska, California and Australia we must deal with finer gold. Fortunately we have a lot of it so it is worth our while to prospect. I mentioned innovators – we want our fine gold recovery to be more efficient and easier since we do it a lot.
At my equipment store I see several prospectors a day looking for something to deal with our fine Colorado gold. There are recovery machines that will do the job and I always preach patience to my clientele. Auto panners, vortex bowls and “poop” tubes all have there place but I was intrigued by a new piece of equipment, The Catch It Water Table.
This machine is impressive. When I first saw a demonstration I was skeptical. After seeing the black sands separate easily from the gold I asked if we could demo my concentrates, typical Arkansas River cons with black sand and very fine gold. Amazing… it took only tens of seconds to cleanup a spoonful of cons and separate the gold from the black sand. Increase the challenge – I added several spoonfuls to the Water Table at one time – no problem, still separating very well. OK, bring on the already processed concentrates. Pulling tailings from our demo vortex bowl I added them to the Water Table. (The bowl has been my favorite for our fine gold for a long time). Well, I saw what looked like 50 and 100 mesh gold recovered from those processed cons on the Water Table – WOW. In all fairness, I had only classified those cons to 30 mesh before processing in the bowl but how great to save reclassifying and rerunning when the Table appears to pick it up in one run. Finally, I pulled material that had already run through the Water Table to gauge effectiveness. There was a small amount of gold in the tailings but not much, efficiency seems to be very good.
My favorite things about the Catch It Water Table: -deals well with the fine gold of our area, -processing is quick, -efficiency is high, -and although I haven’t yet tried it with cons larger than 30 mesh, classifying is minimized with 30 minus material. (Boy I never thought I would say that – I’m a “pusher” when it comes to classifying). At this point, the Catch It Water Table is my favorite for fine gold. I highly recommended it
Here is a link to the Rock Doc http://www.therockdoc.net/Page.aspx?PageID=4222
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