Got out a little today....................

[Oregon Viking]

Nothing!! No color at all. It started raining and my clean up sluice is set up outside. I gave up for the evening.



It turns sludge like in my small sluice. The last time I did this, was with my A52 with deep V mat, Nesika beach sand. We ran it at the beach.
Someone said, in another thread I think...refiner would pay 10 bucks a pound? Sold!
150 sittin' on the scale!!

 

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[johnedoe]

If we could find that refiner we would be SET.........

 

[Reed Lukens]

The magnetics in the clean gold sluice are nice, we've been using rows for decades in the head of our trommels and it does work really good. Pretty much, classification is the only way to separate but maybe you could crush the sands in a small home made rod or ball mill to help get the magnetics closer to the gold size and then screen down to 150 and 200 mesh. I'm sure that the small screens that Pioneer makes has a -100 mesh but if we keep calling them hopefully we can get them down to -200 I have a set of these for working in the field.
4" Stackable Screen System

But you can get these in all sizes also along with the sifters and presses.
http://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Herbal-Pollen-stackable-Extractor/dp/B00H8AD2QE

then here is a conversion chart for you. 60 microns would be close to the #230
Particle Size Conversion Table | Sigma-Aldrich

 

[arizau]

That much heavy black sand will definitely plug up the fluid bed of a bazooka......
Did you get any color out of it at all?

Color but apparently little to no concentration. The box seemed to stay active but apparently was not. That or maybe the bank was relatively barren of gold? I have since reconfigured my zook, it's homemade, so that tube water is introduced directly to the bottom of the box which should keep material fluid all the way from the bottom up. The addition of some oversize stones in the box may help me as was suggested by Kevinincolorado.

On the same day I tried a homemade magnetic sluice (parallel lines similar to yours). I probably ran it too hot (I set it up the same place I set up the zook) and the results were inconclusive to me since I had no basis of comparison. More color than the zook but also more collected concentrates so maybe somewhere around equal concentration or were both incidental(?).

Last year I tried a 5' stream sluice with goldhog mats but I think I ran it too hot too. It had obviously more concentration than the other two but still not as much gold as I had hoped for based on test panning. May try all three again this summer and spend more time tuning flows, etc.

 

[arizau]

The magnetics in the clean gold sluice are nice, we've been using rows for decades in the head of our trommels and it does work really good. Pretty much, classification is the only way to separate but maybe you could crush the sands in a small home made rod or ball mill to help get the magnetics closer to the gold size and then screen down to 150 and 200 mesh. I'm sure that the small screens that Pioneer makes has a -100 mesh but if we keep calling them hopefully we can get them down to -200 I have a set of these for working in the field.
4" Stackable Screen System

But you can get these in all sizes also along with the sifters and presses.
http://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Herbal-Pollen-stackable-Extractor/dp/B00H8AD2QE

then here is a conversion chart for you. 60 microns would be close to the #230
Particle Size Conversion Table | Sigma-Aldrich

Talk them into a 150 and a 200 and I'm in at those prices. 3 extra size fractions below 100 could be boon to my efforts.

 

[Clay Diggins]

Copper slick plate coated with mercury will do the trick. Sometimes it's not necessary to reinvent the wheel.

Heavy Pans

 

[Reed Lukens]

Copper slick plate coated with mercury will do the trick. Sometimes it's not necessary to reinvent the wheel.

Heavy Pans

Isn't that the truth Clay I still have the plates from Gramp's old system, I've used them myself many years ago. But taking them out in public and using them in front of the DFW rangers.... Maybe I could tell them that it's silver...
Sillllver, YaHooo as quoted from Yukon Cornelius

 

[Oregon Viking]

A friend's father in law has a spiral wheel. He asked for some beach sand this morning. He said it is slow, very slow. It would take forever. As you can see from the above pics, I can bring home a LOT of black sand. You can see gold glinting at you in the sunlight. I would like to run the black sand fast, and just have clean gold that I can snuffer bottle up! I guess I'm asking too much.

 

[johnedoe]

Color but apparently little to no concentration. The box seemed to stay active but apparently was not. That or maybe the bank was relatively barren of gold? I have since reconfigured my zook, it's homemade, so that tube water is introduced directly to the bottom of the box which should keep material fluid all the way from the bottom up. The addition of some oversize stones in the box may help me as was suggested by Kevinincolorado.

On the same day I tried a homemade magnetic sluice (parallel lines similar to yours). I probably ran it too hot (I set it up the same place I set up the zook) and the results were inconclusive to me since I had no basis of comparison. More color than the zook but also more collected concentrates so maybe somewhere around equal concentration or were both incidental(?).

Last year I tried a 5' stream sluice with goldhog mats but I think I ran it too hot too. It had obviously more concentration than the other two but still not as much gold as I had hoped for based on test panning. May try all three again this summer and spend more time tuning flows, etc.

Flow and angle are the keys....... I think I was running way to hot when I took my samples .... The cleangold will run pretty fast but you still have to give stuff time to settle.... I don't think there will be nearly as much of a problem when I run the big one... 16"x24" slick and 16"x24" sluice..... Of course I'm gonna have 6 time the black sand cons to deal with compared to the prospector with is 8"x8".....

 

[Clay Diggins]

Uh... Mercury isn't illegal. You can order it online, no shipping restrictions or warning labels needed as long as you ship it within the U.S. I'm not sure what the problem would be? Would a fishy game officer even know what a coated slick plate was?

Heavy Pans

 

[johnedoe]

Uh... Mercury isn't illegal. You can order it online, no shipping restrictions or warning labels needed as long as you ship it within the U.S. I'm not sure what the problem would be? Would a fishy game officer even know what a coated slick plate was?

Heavy Pans

I really don't need to deal with mercury.. just not going there.

 

[specksandflecks]

I'm not sure as to what the refiners were getting from the heavy sands that they were supposedly paying that price. I'm also not 100% sure about about the figure. It was years ago and second hand info. You know how that goes..

I can say the area was/is known for chromite. That should cut down the list of possibilities? As usual, the Devil is in the detail.

 

[johnedoe]

And it's not a secret as you can see black sand from the parking lot!.

View attachment 1130847

My arms are now 3 inches longer...
Tourists will see the size 14 deep boot prints and think it was bigfoot...

Well I went to Eugene Saturday and picked up the Gorilla cart..... No more stretched arms..LOL

OK.... Some assembly required....

Front end section assembled with help from the cat....

Front carriage and rear carriage assembled and attached to wagon body....

Wheels put on the assembly with wagon sitting on all fours......

Wagon in dump mode........

Can't wait to try this bad boy out.... The tires are 13" and should work pretty well in firm and wet sand. dry sand? Nope ain't gonna happen, still have to use a bucket to get it to the wagon to go to the water and sluice..... But it is still gonna make life easier especially since all my area is firm and wet sands.

 

[Oregon Viking]

That will work!

Your Clean gold sluice, how strong is the magnet! Will it pick up silver dollar sized washers? I would like to modify my A52/V mat only beach sluice. I have magnets that will pick up 50 pounds...that just picks up 99% of my black sand!

 

[johnedoe]

That will work!

Your Clean gold sluice, how strong is the magnet! Will it pick up silver dollar sized washers? I would like to modify my A52/V mat only beach sluice. I have magnets that will pick up 50 pounds...that just picks up 99% of my black sand!

I just went out to the garage and put a few things on it and , yeah it will hold washers and a number of other odds and ends....lol
I don't know what the Lbs per Sq Ft holding power is but is fair... I guess I could find a piece of flat steel and do some testing.
Won't hold a wrench but the flatter the contact areas the better the holding power.

 

[arizau]

Strong magnets are not necessary and would actually dilute the concentration since there would be a huge excess amount of magnetic black sands collected by using them.

The magnetic area is probably most similar in strength to magnetic advertising signs attached to delivery vehicles. The main difference is the way the magnetic surface is oriented. The magnetic surface of the sluice is oriented in close parallel lines and each line is North to North or South to South to the adjacent line thus each line repels the next. Ridges, made up of a porous matrix of black sand, are formed on each line while in use and there is a dip between them (because of the repellent force) giving the appearance of corduroy. The gaps are a space for the gold to fall into then bury in the next ridge. As material is added the majority of the blondes and other non mag. material is washed over and out of the sluice. Magnetic black sands are attracted and are constantly exchanging with other stuck particles and the losers are washed out. Gold gets buried by the exchanging and is mostly protected.

Most if not all sign magnets have full attraction side to side and end to end and will not form the parallel lines. It will form a dense, smooth black sand mat that sort of acts like a slick plate and allows most of the rest of the material added to just flow over the top of it and out of the sluice.

With online search you may find properly oriented sheets but I used strips of oriented 1/2" mag. tape side by side to make mine.

Good luck.

 

[KevinInColorado]

Doug Watson (on tnet) makes a beach sluice designed for this gold so might have some advice on processing your cons. His sluice is pretty popular for prospectors digging the beaches in WA. He sent me some raw beach sand a year or two ago to experiment with in a Bazooka. I found it was easy to keep the fluid bed active but also easy to blow a lot of -50 and -100 gold right out of the fluid bed unless I preloaded it with regular gravel as someone mentioned above in this thread. The gravel creates the bed you need. With gravel in there, the Bazooka Prospector I was running held all the gold down to 100 but only some of the gold below that size...not sure the lower size limit captured since my finest screen is 100 mesh. Anyway, I had great success panning the material and the cons at decent volumes of material by:
1. Classify all material thru 50 and 100 mesh screens
2. Put classified material in a large pan with at least an inch of water on top of it
3. Use a strong magnet to pull mag sand up thru the water to the magnet ( this washes any gold back down into the pan as the mag sand comes up)
4. Repeat until all mag sand is collected (may need to stir sand in pan with magnet to gather deeper mag material, then dump sand gathered with stirring into a separate pan full of water to repeat set 3)
5. Pan mag free, classified material with jet dry using shake and tap method (aka Blueberry Bump) in a smooth bottomed 10" finish pan.

...With this method, the panning is pretty quick and easy!

6. Suck up that gold!

 

[Oregon Viking]

I thought that Mr. Watson designed a sluice for Brawn?

 

[KevinInColorado]

I thought that Mr. Watson designed a sluice for Brawn?

Not sure the biz arrangements, could be.

 

[johnedoe]

I think once you are at the stage of super cons a one of the good little miller tables would be more efficient......
But then again ya gotta find what you are most comfortable with when it comes to retrieving the final gold from your cons.......

Oregon Viking......
Did you get the rest of that coffee can of black sand cleaned up?... Was there anything in that batch?