Going to Crush for first time couple questions

[FSM]

I am going to crush for the first time. My claim has about 1500 tons of ore stockpiled that was never processed and about an equal amount of tailings.

From the tailings pile I sent off 7 different assays all randomly selected with no cherry picking. They showed about 3/4 oz gold, and a 1/2 oz of silver per ton. My plan and what I have in place is to crush it to 100-200 mesh and run it through a sluice, empty out of the sluice into a gold cube to catch what the sluice misses. My question is will the silver stick around in the sluice and gold cube or will it wash out? If so is there a way to recover both the gold and the silver? leaving the silver behind is like 7 bucks a ton I would be losing.

considering my crusher should do 3k lbs and hour according to the builder, that 7 bucks a ton would cover my fuel costs

Thanks for any answers, help or suggestions

 

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[arizau]

I am going to crush for the first time. My claim has about 1500 tons of ore stockpiled that was never processed and about an equal amount of tailings.

From the tailings pile I sent off 7 different assays all randomly selected with no cherry picking. They showed about 3/4 oz gold, and a 1/2 oz of silver per ton. My plan and what I have in place is to crush it to 100-200 mesh and run it through a sluice, empty out of the sluice into a gold cube to catch what the sluice misses. My question is will the silver stick around in the sluice and gold cube or will it wash out? If so is there a way to recover both the gold and the silver? leaving the silver behind is like 7 bucks a ton I would be losing.
bi
considering my crusher should do 3k lbs and hour according to the builder, that 7 bucks a ton would cover my fuel costs

Thanks for any answers, help or suggestions

ch

I think you may not fully understand your assay results. The silver assay represents the total amount of silver in the sample regardless of what form it is in. Silver can be metallic (that is rare) but is most often in mineral form and there are several different silver minerals. It is also possible that the silver may be naturally alloyed with gold along with copper etc. Silver minerals are concentrated by different means than sluicing.

100 to 200 mesh is tiny and and gold of that size is usually inefficiently caught in a sluice. Why are you choosing to crush it that fine?

 

[FSM]

That is what the crusher I bought crushes it to. Not sure how else to get the gold out.

 

[bobw53]

A few thoughts... You have crushed up some samples and it is free mill gold? Its not locked up in some pyrite or sulfides or some other compound I don't even know exists yet?

On the 100-200 mesh thing... On my claim I have a few areas where they were stripping spider veins close to the surface... On one side of the channel is the overburden, on the other
side is what I thought might be the ore... Looks like they were taking it away, and then stopped toward the end of the channel... So I took a couple of buckets home... Crushed
up a few small pieces... I had only been classifying down to a 60.. But I had some new screens and took this sample down to a 80 and 120, about .008" and .004"... GOLD!!!!!

So I went to work with my little home made rock crusher.. I got a decent bit done before the Harbor Freight angle grinder literally exploded into pieces... Ran that through the cube.
Brought it down to a 60 and NOTHING... Looking back, I wish I had taken it down to the 80 and 120... I've recently started running all my samples through the 80 and 120 and
besides making panning the cons quicker, I was missing a TON of gold TONS of it, 100's of pieces per 2-4 bucket sample. I'm now gluing up some 250 and 400 screens .0025"
and .0015".... I can't wait to see what pops out of that.

As for the Gold Cube.... For me, its been catching everything.. Right down to pieces that are so small that I can only identify them by a golden dot under a 60X scope, and its catching
it all in the first tray. I don't process the 2nd and 3rd tray anymore, I save it, and run it through when I clean up the panning tubs. Granted this is placer gold that has naturally eroded
out of the rocks, and I am right at the source, I'm not sure how getting beaten in the rock crusher will effect the shape and courseness of the gold, that "hydraulic equivalence" thing.
I will hopefully find out shortly, I have a 16" rock crusher on the drawing board.

As for the 60X scope, the -120 doesn't look huge under it, but you can see the shape and character of it. The little dots. I'm not sure if its even worth going after... We'll see shortly.
Might be worth just stockpiling all the -400 and melting it down at some point, I don't know yet.... And there is a 500X USB microscope somewhere in the postal system making its
way slowly to me.

Good luck, its always nice when somebody has already done the hard part.

One last thought, on the "mesh" size... That system works well for larger sizes, but when you get down into the smaller stuff, wire size really messes up the hole size, so you have
to pay close attention to what the hole size actually is. I've been buying screen from McMaster Carr, and they list the wire size and actual hole size...