advice welcome -handling fine crushed tone

[jrib1]

Built a small rock crusher, crushed and got about 2 buckets of material, I only have 50and 100 mesh screens, material is dry, and advice on how to proceed to see if any fine gold is present ? thanks for any suggestions, john

 

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[goldenIrishman]

I'd start by running it through the 100 mesh first. Anything that doesn't make it through it run through the 50. Then carefully pan everything down so you're working with close to the same sizes. When you're able to, I'd strongly suggest that you invest in some more classifiers in different sizes. Panning is most effective when everything is close to the same size as you work it. There are some vendors on E-Bay that have sets of classifiers for good prices. A couple will even let you pick which sizes you get in the set so you don't end up with multiples of the same size.

 

[jrib1]

Going thru 100 classifier, dry. Or wet ?

 

[enamel7]

Going thru 100 classifier, dry. Or wet ?

Wet of course!

 

[goldenIrishman]

Wet is always easier.

The only thing I grind is my black sands using a small rod mill. When I run a batch, the end result is like talc that even dry will usually go through a 100 mesh classifier like water but I still do it wet because the rod mill requires water in the mix and waiting for it to dry is not needed. Just set your pan in your panning tub/tray and put your classifier over it. SLOWLY pour the materials into it and work it through with your hand. In your case, because you only have the two sizes of classifiers, anything that doesn't go through the 100 mesh can be put through the 50. If it doesn't go through the 50 then I'd run it through your crusher again after it dries.

 

[jrib1]

Thanks goldenirishman, almost everything went thru the 50 mesh, been quite a learning curve, pan it out, real fine flower gold I believe, some black sand also, thanks again for the info, take care

 

[IMAUDIGGER]

Once you find some gold are you want to process, I would think it would be worth the time to test your material to see how small you have to crush it to liberate an acceptable percentage of the gold.
The effort to crush ore to a powder in order to pass some arbitrary screen size might not be worth the additional recovery rate you achieve.
Might be better off finding richer ore and getting comfortable with the fact that you will always be throwing some gold away.