Something for the small operator

[Mad Machinist]

I'm not understanding your posting entirely with regards to the "Miners" mining miners in this context as well as the reference to "pczim" commenting in a previous posting regarding someone using mercury in their mining operation to regards to my previous answering someone's question.

Can you elaborate as to what you are referencing for better clarity?

Dwight,

As for "miners mining miners" I guess I gotta put it bluntly. Alot ofnleopel out there try to convince miners that their product is the best game in town when in all actuality its crap. So the miner lays put the cash for the product that is crap and gets the shaft in the end.

Tamrock posted this up and pczim said he has four of these in operation in Africa that need mercury to be effective. So if a centrifugal concentrator needs mercury added to be effective, then it's a piece of crap.

I've been around centrifugal concentrators a long time. While the concept is sound, very few actually work as advertised.

Clear as mud?

 

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[StreamlineGold]

I just saw this thread this morning for the first time, so that's why I hadn't responded previously. I'm the "Williams" in the LNW Engineering & Mining. The picture by tamrock is a picture of our LC-TB32 Centrifugal Bowl at the Elko Expo, of course. In remaining in compliance with board rules, I don't wish to provide further "Sales" data on our equipment directly, but if you have specific questions, I'm happy to answer any of those for you.

As a course of the initial discussion, Concentrator Bowls can be very efficient in concentration of volume ore slurry. There are many factors in the overall performance of the different iterations of manufactures of bowls. We own I believe just about every brand of concentration bowl that has been produced for the past 50 years, up to and including Falcon SB250 models. Each one has a specific function that the designer was trying to accomplish and at times may have been effective at addressing and others, not so much.

At the end of the day and all the dust settles, regardless of the equipment and processes you employ in your mining circuit, things have to be able to run smoothly and effectively without complications. As I have learned the hard way, life is complicated enough out on the mine; you certainly don't need to incorporate complexity into your grinding and recovery circuit if you don't have to.

Dwight Williams (Socorro)
LNW Engineering & Mining

Welcome

Looks like the one Posted just above is a knudson style, However looks like yours has a spiral shape, can you elaborate on how well it works on ultra fine where that gravity number is so very critical? I know a lot of people swear by Neff bowls.

 

[Socorro]

Dwight,

As for "miners mining miners" I guess I gotta put it bluntly. Alot ofnleopel out there try to convince miners that their product is the best game in town when in all actuality its crap. So the miner lays put the cash for the product that is crap and gets the shaft in the end.

Tamrock posted this up and pczim said he has four of these in operation in Africa that need mercury to be effective. So if a centrifugal concentrator needs mercury added to be effective, then it's a piece of crap.

I've been around centrifugal concentrators a long time. While the concept is sound, very few actually work as advertised.

Clear as mud?

Thanks for your reply. I got the word "blunt", but not sure it's full intent and meaning. I'm assuming you are referring to my involvement in building mining equipment and our equipment as crap if I am understanding your "Blunt" aspect in your response. If you would reference this original thread, which Tamrock posted, I was simply responding to an already started topic, only to provide a point that I "Knew" who made the equipment that was seen at the Elko Mine Expo.

With respect to a centrifuge concentrator needing mercury to actually function correctly, I would agree on that point, if you are needing mercury for recovery, you are not using a properly designed centrifuge. I would add however that centrifuge concentrators of dubious designs and quality are being used throughout Africa collecting mercury from the soil. The ground is so highly contaminated with past mining that the ore being ran through the centrifuges are collecting the mercury as a by-product since the Mercury cannot escape just as the gold cannot.

Secondly, I don't see where pczim stated that our equipment was using mercury unless I am missing something somewhere. I personally am not aware of any of our centrifuge bowls being used with mercury for gold recovery. In the proper conditions, such as in a ball mill slurry at 200 mesh grind, our concentrator bowls will separate up to 500 mesh (-35 micron), depending upon the material being recovered and the gangue which it's being separated from.

 

[Socorro]

Welcome

Looks like the one Posted just above is a knudson style, However looks like yours has a spiral shape, can you elaborate on how well it works on ultra fine where that gravity number is so very critical? I know a lot of people swear by Neff bowls.

Thank you StreamlineGold, it's always nice to find a group of folks with similar interest, especially in the mining world.

There have been dozens of folks who have attempted or successfully made some type of centrifugal bowls over the past 60 plus years, all with varying success. Until recently, Larry Neff's Neffco bowls have been the mainstream system that has been readily available over the years. My first centrifuge bowl was a Neffco back about ten years ago and was using it in my ball mill circuit.

I plan on providing some very detailed information very soon as to the differences in the bowl designs across the board so that it better explains how we came about the design that we have. But for ease of context, you have low and high gravity bowls, and ours as well as Neffco's is considered a low gravity bowl, they run around 6g's, compared to 150-300g's, in a pressurized fluidization bed design.

The Neffco's bowl is a single, continuous riffle in the bowl, about 100 feet of riffles to be exact. Ours is a 5-Lead riffle, 8-Lead for our Triple Bowl, each riffle composing of approximately 19.4 feet in length. Regardless of salesmanship and advertising smoke, the ability to have more than a single riffle is inherently better. It is an ability to, in basic visual terms to go from a fine pitch screw to a coarse pitch screw, a wedge so to speak. The significant difficulty with any centrifugal system is having a means of the material not to pack, which will cause you to lose your fluidization bed in the riffles. By increasing the angle of the riffles, which is where the multi-leads come into play, forces the material to move more effectively along the riffles while rotating, thereby preventing the packing issue. As I said, through all the smoke and mirrors of salesmanship, the increased riffles are always better, but very, very difficult to manufacture in production.




(Gold recovered with Bowl)

It took us over $140K to develop just the bowl section to provide an entirely manufactured system in-house. I'm a Tool & Die machinist by trade, so, fortunately, we can make all the molds in-house; otherwise, the cost would have been about $300K more. Working with my cousin, who is a mechanical engineer at Nasa and directly with 3M, gave me some critical information we were needing. Along with a retired engineer who worked on the Space Shuttle, came up with a way to reliably bond and install the 5 spiral leads into our bowl. And yes, I thought for a few months that this damn thing was going to Mars, unbelievably complicated initially to make this design. I have built components for the Space Shuttle and various other aerospace and space vehicles over the years, and this is was much more challenging to come to the final product. There's a reason why gold's value is so high.

I plan on providing some in-depth information along with pictures to give people the visual difference in the designs. A significant byproduct of the 5-lead bowl, unintentional, but very nice is that you can clean the bowl out about five times faster than a single lead bowl. Since you are only rinsing 19.4 feet per riffle, rather than over 100 feet.

To address the issue with extremely small gold recovery, 200-500 mesh gold, you MUST have a fluidization bed always working. If you have any compaction or loss of your fluidization bed in your centrifugal bowl, you will immediately lose any fine particle gold. We built this design specifically for the ability to recover down to 500 mesh gold.

 

[Socorro]

Microscopic Gold Recovery Clarification

I have received some PM's from folks calling me out that they don't believe you can separate pure gold with a centrifugal bowl, as in my pictures in my previous post.

They are correct, in that I failed to provide details on the process, sorry about that, hey, at least people are reading.

The pictures I posted are from the gold that was recovered from concentrate from the bowl. Then those were run on our prototype table to separate the gold from the heavies. So, No, you are not going to get pure gold out of a concentrator. This has been an ongoing effort for over 10 years to be able to separate 800-1000 mesh gold by gravity separation.

So there is no confusion, our concentrator bowl did extract this gold from the head ore, but it was cleaned up on our own table to obtain the clean gold.

 

[Mad Machinist]

800-100] mesh? Sub micron by gravity? I gotta call bull. I won't do it by PM, I'll do it in front of everybody.

You said you learned from the flotation masters at Freeport? You wanna take a wild guess who I work for and where?

So where did you learn? Baghdad? Sierritta? Sahaurita? Morenci?

 

[Socorro]

800-100] mesh? Sub micron by gravity? I gotta call bullshit. I won't do it by PM, I'll do it in front of everybody.

You said you learned from the flotation masters at Freeport? You wanna take a wild guess who I work for and where?

So where did you learn? Baghdad? Sierritta? Sahaurita? Morenci?

? ? ?

 

[Mad Machinist]

? ? ?

Dwight,

There arenalotnif things here that just don't add up. You put questions up in response to what I posted which is exactly what I read on your website under your blog. You said in that blog you learned from the flotation masters at Freeport. I simply asked which mine you learned at and listed a few

I quite literally grew up in the mining industry. My father was a miner. My Grand father was a miner. I can trace my mining heritage all the way back to the Corwall miners from England a long time ago.

Freeport laid a very disgusting amount if money on the table to bring me to this side in the country in 2007. I have been doing hardrock mining on and off for nearly 25 years now.

So I tell you what. In interests of being fair, let's see if your willing to put your money where your mouth is. We will be in production soon with our own mine. So bring your equipment and met us put it through its paces. If it stands up and does what you say it will, we will sing it's praises. If it doesn't, well.......

I am a well respected member here and my word Carrie's quite a bit of weight. You game?

 

[Socorro]

I am a well respected member here and my word Carrie's quite a bit of weight. You game?

Entertaining for sure.

 

[gold tramp]

How long of actuall hands on work at floatation makes one a master and does tool size matter.
I like that orange machine it looks like it would speed up my op. never used a bowl but wouldnt kick stones at one either.

Were just makin cons MM its gonna get leached or amalgamated anyways. correct me if im wrong, were all miners here, some do more work some make more money.

Also theres a big differance in a person workin for a company mining.
Heck try mining where you have to get gold every week for pay.


So why the big stink?
Gt.......

 

[Mad Machinist]

Couple of things here.

First off, Socorro I keep you an apology. I looked right at the numbers for submicron gold and it didn't click. And for that I do apologize. I'm man enough to admit when I made a mistake and I Ken up to them.

GT,

I wish I could really tell people what I do for Freeport but I am under several nondisclosure agreements. All I can say is i get to play with a whole lot of experimental equipment from alot of big names around the world.

The problem here is what Socorro stated his machine will recover. 500 mesh is .001 inches in diameter. To put this in perspective, the average human hair is about .002 inches in diameter. So pull one out and split it lengthwise. He then goes on to claim his machine will recover 800-1000 mesh which is about .0007 to .0005 inches in diameter. This is where I call crap. The actual limit the human eye can see is around 400-500 mesh depending on the person's eyesight.

Another way to put this in perspective is to compare it to talcum power which is around 1250 mesh.

I was involved in a of testing several years ago that involved experimental recovery techniques for the mine here. What we found out is that around 500 mesh even gold will float away due to the surface tension of the water unless a surfactant is used. In the end we found that it is much easier to use flotation to recover particles that small.

 

[Mad Machinist]

Entertaining for sure.

Here ya go folks. Straight from his site.
THE GOLD STORY ? LNW Engineering

Scroll down and read under The Gold Bug.

 

[gold tramp]

I was just funnin.MM, i have never worked floatation. I just use a table n wheel.
Socorro my input here on your product is worthess i couldnt even afford it anyway.
Good luck guys.
Gt......

 

[Mad Machinist]

I was just funnin.MM, i have never worked floatation. I just use a table n wheel.
Socorro my input here on your product is worthess i couldnt even afford it anyway.
Good luck guys.
Gt......

It's all good brother. Freeport has put out a hell of a lot of money for my education so i get a little defensive when someone mentions there name along with spouting crap.

I posted up in another thread where EVERYBODY can get the same education I have if they are willing to throw down.

 

[pczim]

Unfortunately guys , in mining we all have to put up with the sales people, that’s their job. With our friend Sorocco, that’s his business that looks like he started it, a small scale business, the type of business that needs support and perhaps his product is worth a try. I enjoy seeing startups work, especially in our industry.

Having been approached by many mining equipment manufacturers that claim all things under the sun, I will only buy something that is proven, the separator pictures I posted previously work for me but yes I use mercury, I can say this in confidence as I randomly pan the sands after the separator. When milling good ore, we often get floating gold so we throw in some dishwasher or soap powder on the ore before we mill and that seems to solve the problem.

Soroccos machine seems very expensive to me, I buy mine for less than one fifth of his machines price, I’m not sure what the difference is between the machines I use and the machine he builds, I would hope he would care to explain....

Sorocco, I will make you a proposal... send me a machine which I will run off a T piece so half my sand flows through my separator and half will flow through your machine. I will let you know if there is a difference!!

Anyway all been away for a while building an elution machine for me mine and concentrating mostly on my underground. I hope you are all well.

 

[StreamlineGold]

I have received some PM's from folks calling me out that they don't believe you can separate pure gold with a centrifugal bowl, as in my pictures in my previous post.

They are correct, in that I failed to provide details on the process, sorry about that, hey, at least people are reading.

The pictures I posted are from the gold that was recovered from concentrate from the bowl. Then those were run on our prototype table to separate the gold from the heavies. So, No, you are not going to get pure gold out of a concentrator. This has been an ongoing effort for over 10 years to be able to separate 800-1000 mesh gold by gravity separation.

So there is no confusion, our concentrator bowl did extract this gold from the head ore, but it was cleaned up on our own table to obtain the clean gold.

You guys ever return a call, or an email?

 

[StreamlineGold]

Unfortunately guys , in mining we all have to put up with the sales people, that’s their job. With our friend Sorocco, that’s his business that looks like he started it, a small scale business, the type of business that needs support and perhaps his product is worth a try. I enjoy seeing startups work, especially in our industry.

Having been approached by many mining equipment manufacturers that claim all things under the sun, I will only buy something that is proven, the separator pictures I posted previously work for me but yes I use mercury, I can say this in confidence as I randomly pan the sands after the separator. When milling good ore, we often get floating gold so we throw in some dishwasher or soap powder on the ore before we mill and that seems to solve the problem.

Soroccos machine seems very expensive to me, I buy mine for less than one fifth of his machines price, I’m not sure what the difference is between the machines I use and the machine he builds, I would hope he would care to explain....

Sorocco, I will make you a proposal... send me a machine which I will run off a T piece so half my sand flows through my separator and half will flow through your machine. I will let you know if there is a difference!!

Anyway all been away for a while building an elution machine for me mine and concentrating mostly on my underground. I hope you are all well.

There are a lot of cheap knudsen bowl copies around...the difference i see with their design is its kind of a hybrid between neffco and knudsen, its a spiral shape vs concentric rings. Its to solve the problem of packing of cons which knudsen will do just like a sluice, you pack the riffles and lose gold. I can tell you getting a mold designed for rubber is not cheap in any way. I would like to see one in action..

I do think the more expensive falcon and Knelson centrifuges are the best product, but its cost prohibitive... more of a long term installation type of thing for your mill. I may even try one if I find some buyers for my used equipment laying around..

 

[Mad Machinist]

It really doesn't matter if a centrifugal concentrator can recover down to 1000 mesh. The fact if the matter is that without some type of surfactant added to the water, most gold under about 325 mesh is going to float away anyhow due to the surface tension of the water used when it is panned, tabled or even when the bowl is washed out. This is simple physics.

Even Falcon does not mention the use of a surfactant in the recovery process. And in this they are doing themselves a great disservice.

Soccorro may very well have the "holy grail" of gold recovery but his lack of defending his product and being more forthcoming with information is hurting him badly.

I've been in the mining industry as a "professional miner" for a long damn time. My offer still stands.

I'll put the $5k for his product in an escrow account. If it works as he claims, he gets the money. If not, he doesn't.

 

[StreamlineGold]

What bothers me is I have called these guys and emailed them multiple times and they don’t respond, for somebody that supposed to be for the small miner thats just not a business I care to deal with.

 

[Socorro]

What bothers me is I have called these guys and emailed them multiple times and they don’t respond, for somebody that supposed to be for the small miner thats just not a business I care to deal with.

StreamlineGold, We have had a very busy season and totally lost track of checking here on the forum for replies, since we don't receive notifications on a posting outside of our own thread. However, we handle emails and phone calls around the clock for customers worldwide and to my knowledge, we have not missed any calls or callbacks at any time. If you could provide your name and contact I would be happy to verify your emails and calls, just want to make sure you are calling and emailing the correct number and email address. Our phone number is 800.858.5504 and email address is: [email protected]