arizau
Silver Member
So I got the blue bowl up and running and I processed my Cherry Creek outing, here's what I know:
1. I was definitely blowing out the superfines - both gold and iron - my quart of black sands ended up being mostly +50 material. I am attributing this to the fact that I didn't do enough cleanouts. When I did the finger check in the trap, and it felt just like rocks, I should have known better and done a cleanout. Yes the BGT is susceptible to having its trap load up and no longer being efficient, but then again what sluice isn't? I spent nearly as much time with the Angus 22 a few days before at Arapahoe Bar and I took home even less concentrates that day, because I wasn't doing my cleanouts diligently. That having been said, I do think the BGT prefers not to keep the -100's especially if there's lots of chunky magnetite. But I can't confirm until I process my Clear Creek canyon cons.
2. Given that Cherry Creek is a known low-producer, and that I don't know the actual availability of gold in the downtown section, I can't compare what I took home to what I should have taken home. I really don't know what's there but even in the test pan it seemed a low concentration of the superfines that I essentially didn't really take home anyway. My panning skills for the micro gold are probably not up to par though.
3. My geology professor was impressed I found any flakes at all in Cherry Creek in lower downtown, but I did. The photo below is the +50's I collected, a couple dozen extremely shiny Castle Rock conglomerate placer flakes. They're much a much prettier color than anything I've ever pulled out of Clear Creek. I had a few dozen -50's too, and not that many -100's, but I got impatient and threw all the -50's into the next batch to process instead of waiting for the blue bowl to clear (wow that thing takes forever). So it's only the +50's in the picture.
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By the way Blue Bowl owners, what's the best way to process your +30's? Right now I'm stuck panning it. Turns out I'm not that good at not throwing the flakes out.
If you don't already have them then invest in some 30, 50 and 100 mesh classifiers. 4 to 6" diameter ones are suggested when you don't have a lot of concentrate to mess with and still ok for larger quantities but requires more handling. Makes panning much easier (gold rules) when all the material in the pan is about the same size (there are about 100% differences from screen to screen in those sizes). Only pan small quantities at a time for the smaller sizes. You will also be better able to adjust the blue bowl by running closely classified material.
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