Getting gold out of plus 8 classified material

[raykeen]

What is the best way to recover gold from material that did not go through a #8 classifier. Any suggestions?

 

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[goldgit'r]

Pan it! Any gold that large will be easy.

Wes

 

[Rdg Sluicer]

Just pick it out with your fingers.

 

[goldenmojo]

Pick out the bigger stuff and then pan off the debris a little. Depending on how it was classified and the type of material you might have some very small gold along with the larger gold in the mix.

 

[goldenIrishman]

When panning stuff that large you really need to remember to re-stratify (shake down) the material in your pan at regular intervals. A lot of time gold will settle into the left or right corner of the materials instead of in the center. When you start to see black sands appearing at the corners of your materials, shake everything down again and keep on truckin.

Once you've gotten it down to mostly fine blonde and black sands, run a magnet through it to get the magnetic sands out of the way. This USUALLY will help to loosen up the blonde sands so they can be washed out of the remaining black sands. If you don't have a proper miners magnet you can make an improvised one easy enough with a magnet and a plastic sandwich bag. Put the magnet inside the bag, run it through your pan and then pull the magnet out of the bag while holding it over a container. ALWAYS go back through your magnetics!!! Small gold can be trapped by the magnetics and picked up with them.

Once you've gotten as much gold as you can see out of the black sands, dry them out and run them through a nylon stocking. If you have some way to crush them first, do so. You can put the materials into something like a cleaned out butter tub and then stretch the nylon over it. Shake about a table spoons worth of the materials through the stocking into your pan and rework them SLOWLY. You might just be surprised at how much more gold you find. A good magnifying glass and a eye dropper are very handy to have on hand when you use this method. Glass to spot the gold and dropper to suck it up without a lot of black sand.

 

[Lanny in AB]

Everything everyone else has said, and don't try to run too much at once, especially if it's rich dirt.

Pan it a small scoop at a time.

If there's not much gold, you can pan it several scoops at a time.

It's kind of hard to know truly though how much to tell you to run, or how to run it because I have no idea if there's garnets, chunks of magnetite, pieces of galena, etc. that will make your material rich in super-heavies, which can dramatically limit how much you should pan during each session.

All the best, and if you have a better description of what other materials are running with your +8 material, that would be very helpful,

Lanny

 

[Bonaro]

I assume you have a good amount or you woul dhave just panned it.
Run a strong magnet over it and pull out the magnetics then run all of ot through a sluice. This will reduce by 90%, pan the rest

 

[Bonaro]

When panning stuff that large you really need to remember to re-stratify (shake down) the material in your pan at regular intervals. A lot of time gold will settle into the left or right corner of the materials instead of in the center. When you start to see black sands appearing at the corners of your materials, shake everything down again and keep on truckin.

Once you've gotten it down to mostly fine blonde and black sands, run a magnet through it to get the magnetic sands out of the way. This USUALLY will help to loosen up the blonde sands so they can be washed out of the remaining black sands. If you don't have a proper miners magnet you can make an improvised one easy enough with a magnet and a plastic sandwich bag. Put the magnet inside the bag, run it through your pan and then pull the magnet out of the bag while holding it over a container. ALWAYS go back through your magnetics!!! Small gold can be trapped by the magnetics and picked up with them.

Once you've gotten as much gold as you can see out of the black sands, dry them out and run them through a nylon stocking. If you have some way to crush them first, do so. You can put the materials into something like a cleaned out butter tub and then stretch the nylon over it. Shake about a table spoons worth of the materials through the stocking into your pan and rework them SLOWLY. You might just be surprised at how much more gold you find. A good magnifying glass and a eye dropper are very handy to have on hand when you use this method. Glass to spot the gold and dropper to suck it up without a lot of black sand.

Magnifying glass and eye dropper?!?!
I must be spoiled...I toss that small stuff back

 

[goldenIrishman]

Magnifying glass and eye dropper?!?!
I must be spoiled...I toss that small stuff back

LOL Ya... You must be! I just haven't gotten around to building up a miller table yet. Plus I find panning relaxing as it keeps me out of the bars and out of trouble. I figure that if it's so small that a miller table won't get it, I'll toss THAT back. With grandkids around I don't want to get into leaching at this point. I figure if I'm going to expend the energy to dig it out, I'm going to get all of it I can.

 

[Gold Cube]

The absolute easiest way to know that you got it all is to use a detector. Use a bucket or two to set the detector coil flat and up-side-down. Grab a plastic scoop and put a hand full or half a scoop of material in scoop. Now use head phone to make sure you hear everything. Wave the scoop back and forth over the coil. All the gold will be over 1/8" in size and is an extremely easy target for even the less expensive machines. On a signal you have the choice of isolating it and looking for it or pan it right out. Do this at the mining location and you will never have to haul heavy buckets of oversize up the hill.

 

[Bonaro]

LOL Ya... You must be! I just haven't gotten around to building up a miller table yet. Plus I find panning relaxing as it keeps me out of the bars and out of trouble. I figure that if it's so small that a miller table won't get it, I'll toss THAT back. With grandkids around I don't want to get into leaching at this point. I figure if I'm going to expend the energy to dig it out, I'm going to get all of it I can.

I have tried to get the small stuff but I find it far too time consuming. I run my dredge cons through a sluice then the high grade goes through the gold genie. The GG will get the +150 gold pretty consistently. I have ran my spent cons through a centrifuge and the remaining gold was just not enough to fiddle with. Per year I probably develop over 20 gallons of this spent high grade cons. From the tests I have run I doubt I could pull more than 1/4 gram from all of it and it would take days to hand pan that much. If you have a preponderance of very fine gold, your results may be far different.

 

[goldenIrishman]

In the area I'm working I've found gold from 1-1/4 gram nuggets down to flour gold. yeah.. the super fines are a pain to get out but like I said, panning it down keeps me out of trouble. Once I get moved I'll be able to expand my setup and make things a lot easier. I'm going to have to streamline things since I'll be moving a lot more materials.