Dealing with lots of lead.

[hektic]

Finally found me a spot near my house that is producing decent amounts of gold. Problem is where I find the pockets of gold I find tons of lead from shotguns. I mean a ton!!! Recently I had dug one shovel full sample through my classifier and into my pan from behind a barely under surface boulder and found about a gram of nice gold flakes and about one pound of lead pieces. It takes forever to pan through all the lead.

Is there some techniques to help with all the darn lead When I ran my sluice for a few hours I found about 10 lbs. of lead in my clean out. What a damn pain. Help a brother out !!!

 

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[Aufisher]

Good job on the gold. Great job pulling out the lead left behind by others. Even that lead is worth money.

 

[B H Prospector]

Send pictures of the lead to the enviro-nazis to show them what us miners are doing for free. How we clean the creeks and rivers, and welcome to the net.

 

[kazcoro]

Sounds like you are doing everything right. Just have to grin and bear it.

 

[hektic]

Thanks for the responses. One good thing I guess. When I do a small test pan and find lead then I know I need to dig there. Southern California is tough to find the running streams that have gold that are not hit so hard or have been in the past. Everyone knows about east fork and that is a bit of a trek for me so I'm glad I found this little happy place. I've found color in Cajon Creek and have played there a bit but nothing to get excited about. Gone to Lytle creek a couple times for nada.

 

[KevinInColorado]

Try classifying to separate those nasty birdshot from as much of the rest of the material as possible. I fight this a lot too and found using a 12 and a 20 and a 50 mesh classifier made life much easier.

Do save the lead and post pics so we can all show the Eco benefits of your work to skeptics!

 

[KevinInColorado]

Lead from just the last couple months...the pan with water in it is from just two hours of digging one day last week

 

[Judepb]

Man I wish we had gold here in louisiana. Good luck

 

[Hoser John]

Classification and then acid to remove residual lead is the answer-John

 

[KevinInColorado]

Classification and then acid to remove residual lead is the answer-John

or smelting of course. Either way, not a step for a newbie to do on their own.

 

[releventchair]

Your post explains in part why we have to use steel shot for waterfowling nowadays . I prefer lead but here,s an example of its accumulation and though my opinion on the matter holds little weight,pun intended I don,t see how waterfowl ingest it out of crevices.Eating mud/sediment out in midwest here maybe? Hope you can find a convenient buyer for lead. If there,s a blackpowder,muzzle loader group around they should be interested. Duplex loads have been used before,a classifier could be built if sizes needed to be sorted. Deformed shot can be presented as spreader loads, l.o.l... That said the lead alone would be welcomed to cast bullets and be lots easier. My stash is an 60 lb. ingot. Old dad has a four(?) hundred lb. block that was either a tractor weight or used for driving well pipe maybe. Last loose bought estate shot is stored in buckets or recycled peanut butter jars though last commercial purchased was in canvas bags. Coffee or gas money might be realized one way or another if you accumulate enough lead to make an exchange worth your time, and can sell, or better yet barter it without a hassle.