Thought this was worth re-posting

arizau

Bronze Member
May 2, 2014
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AZ
Detector(s) used
Beach High Banker, Sweep Jig, Whippet Dry Washer, Lobo ST, 1/2 width 2 tray Gold Cube, numerous pans, rocker box, and home made fluid bed and stream sluices.
Primary Interest:
Prospecting
I found this interesting post over on the GPEX forum and thought it was re-posting here (Sorry Joe if you are a member here!)

At the very least this technique could reduce the amount of cons one would have to process with a miller table or blue bowl.:icon_thumright:


""Offline JOE S (INDY)
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Posts: 804
Province/State: Trapper Creek, Alaska and Idaho in the Winter
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Wiser Mining Through Endless Personal Mistakes

Re: Fine black sand vs coarse black sands
« Reply #6 on: Today at 01:46:57 AM »
Mark,

Something I just stumbled on the other night can add a new level of refinement on finding nearly impossible to see Gold in your finish panning.

I was watching some self professed instructor in mining doing some panning giving the usual advice and using the same techniques we all use. Fairly blah, blah, blah until he did something that drew a loud exclamation from my lips.

What he did was to very carefully pan down concentrates and then side tap the Gold to the side of the pan. That Gold was sucker bottled out of the pan a few repetitions until there was no more Gold seen to remove.

Then the guy again shook down the pan and side tapped the "barren pan" which would usually pull any Gold to the side. Then he whipped out an eye loup and identified where the too-small-to-see Gold was left behind and concentrated in the pan. At that point he marked the concentrate crescent showing where the micro Gold was. A second sucker bottle was used to pull the micro Gold and some black sand from the marked portion of the pan - a portion of the pan which was suckered up without having seen Gold except for having used the eye loup.. Once or twice more and there REALLY wasn't any more Gold left in the pan.

At that point (in my operation at least) I would save all my exhausted concentrates and run them all back through the sluice box at the start of the next day. Any escaped Gold in the concentrates ends up back in the next cleanup again.


Joe""
 

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