My wife keeps complaining about the many (yes very many I admit) buckets of sand and gravel in my workshop. They are stacked one and two deep under work benches and under my micron mill wave table and in corners of the shop. She said some only have a few inches of material and I should combine all of the. Tried to explain that buckets are labeled according to the mesh and eventually I will get through them and onto the wave table. So I get the deer in the headlights look from her. Even my grand daughter comes down with a cup and bowl playing in my sand. So last week I decided it was time to really do something rather than the old manana. I set up a 56 qt container and got out my old foot fixer spa that I hacked several years ago. The eccentric motor now is the vibration producer that jiggles the finer particles through the screens. A day or so later and a 20 mesh screen I had slowly filled the container. 14 gallons of -20 sand. So today I bought two more rubbermaids and switched to the 30 mesh which is what is recommended to run across the micron mill wave table. In the shop I also have a 4 inch jaw crusher that I recently obtained and have been using it to break up, rock. Oh I forgot I also have piles of ore under my back deck from many years of collecting. Last week Don and I were out and we found a lot of float of Vug quartz from an old mine on one of the coarsegold claims. I ran this quartz through a secondary impact mill and ran it on the table and some nice gold showed up. So today I am running the 30 mesh which is more than 10 times slower than the 20. All day and I only ended up with several pints of sand. Now I remember why all of these buckets are still here. This is going to take months and I will lose interest quickly. The light went on and I took my gladware scoop (pilfered from our kitchen) filled it and dumped it into the impact mill and out came some nice talc size dust. Wohoo this is great, I am going to bypass all the screening and dump everything into the mill. Will still have to screen it at least once but the talc size passes through the 30 mesh quite fast. I will end up with table run and blue bowl material. The only problem is this mill is a 1/4" table top model so its throughput is limited. I have larger jaw crusher and impact mill which is down in my friends barn in Mariposa. So I will finally be getting all of those buckets out of my shop and garage. Pam will be very happy about this, she has been hinting for years about putting an inlaw apartment in my 20 X 40 ft shop.
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The crusher I have is a braun with an impact mill underneath, powered by a 8 hp briggs engine. It does a good fast job of crunching the 4 to 6 inch rocks and pulverizing them to mostly talc size. My table top impact mill will run up to 1/4 inch pebbles and turn them into talc size dust also. Going to test the big impact mill next week on my sand and see if it will work on the sand size material. I picked these and all of those drills and accessories up at an estate sale in 2005 (that is the date I did the photos and videos) Cannot believe they have been sitting in my garage for 6 years. The recovery canister and impact mill had 3/4 oz of very fine gold in it. So the $45 I paid for it was quite a bargain. As for a crusher they are quite expensive and it takes a lot of rocks to pay for it. We found an old mine that we assayed some of the tailings piles and it came out 2.99 oz per ton of gold and 2.75 oz per ton silver. That is a lot of rock to crush. We will only be working the tailings pile which is much safer.
They operated big mills for a lot less oz per tonnage so yeah, I'd say you did good. That sand sort of worries me though, it doesn't compact and crack like rocks. What do you hope to get out of doing that? What I mean by that, is it worth the effort? I should be careful, I could show my ignorance here easily. There are many, many tailings piles that I would have loved to have a crusher for. I once found an old Arrastre in the Mojave that I managed to scrounge about a 1/4 oz from! Back then I could care less about gold, I was way more interested in arrowheads. Reason?, most of the people I knew then would rob me of the gold, but would not know what to do with an arrowhead! My wife included! They sure wouldn't go into the Mojave to find their own.
The mill has a jaw crusher on it from there it falls down into an impact mill which has a shaft with 6 large impacte blades on it. Everything that falls into there gets whacked around until it is small enough to exit into the catch bucket. I tested this out with my table top and it did a good job of creating talc size particles. This is not ordinary sand, this is a mixture of sand and magnetics, it is my concentrates from my 5" 3" and 2" dredges. I have already taken out the larger pieces of gold. So now I want to see how much fine gold is left in the sand and magnetic s. A friend showed us some electron microscope photos of magnetic sand showing the gold particles that were encrusted on them. I thought of using the cracking method, heating the black sand and driving off the sulphides. But that requires separating the black sand out. That part is waiting for the magnetic classifier that was shown on gold rush Alaska. They are near completion of their work and should have it ready for market sometime this summer.
So in the meantime I am going to run some tests and see if the big mill will pulverize the sand to run on the micron wave table.
I have always been on the watch for Arastas, but around here they are most likely covered in heavy brush. We had been hiking down into this canyon for the last 25 or so years using sluice boxes and small high bankers. 3 years ago a fire came through and took out all the brush. Last year we found a whole mining community there, Rock building foundations stacked rocks on the side the creek sides a few old tools.
14 gallons of -20 mesh, the modified "foot fixer" acquired from a garage sale. The tray underneath is for setting a plant pot on for watering. Talc size output from the impact mill. It still needs to be screened as some larger particles make it into the catch pan.
Brilliant on the "shaker"! I've got a couple of old vibrators around that I've scrounged, one foot type and even a big back massager I think. I gotta make one of these! I'm not too sure where I can find a jaw crusher but I'll get to scrounging. I got enough old ore samples laying around here and in storage to get a pan or two full. Nice work James!
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The mill has a jaw crusher on it from there it falls down into an impact mill which has a shaft with 6 large impacte blades on it. Everything that falls into there gets whacked around until it is small enough to exit into the catch bucket. I tested this out with my table top and it did a good job of creating talc size particles. This is not ordinary sand, this is a mixture of sand and magnetics, it is my concentrates from my 5" 3" and 2" dredges. I have already taken out the larger pieces of gold. So now I want to see how much fine gold is left in the sand and magnetic s. A friend showed us some electron microscope photos of magnetic sand showing the gold particles that were encrusted on them. I thought of using the cracking method, heating the black sand and driving off the sulphides. But that requires separating the black sand out. That part is waiting for the magnetic classifier that was shown on gold rush Alaska. They are near completion of their work and should have it ready for market sometime this summer.
So in the meantime I am going to run some tests and see if the big mill will pulverize the sand to run on the micron wave table.
I have always been on the watch for Arastas, but around here they are most likely covered in heavy brush. We had been hiking down into this canyon for the last 25 or so years using sluice boxes and small high bankers. 3 years ago a fire came through and took out all the brush. Last year we found a whole mining community there, Rock building foundations stacked rocks on the side the creek sides a few old tools.
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