Help identifying brown material in gold ore

[tridge800]

Been working an 1800's tailings, i am personal friends with the land owner and he recently had several pieces of ore and drill core samples assayed with good results..I have crushed several samples and have not found much free milling gold, but my pan was almost completely full with pyrite. From the assay samples showing almost 1oz PT gold, 6oz PT Silver, 11oz PT copper and small amounts of Platinum and Cobalt. I am thinking that the gold must be locked up in the pyrite. What is the best and most economical way of extracting the precious metals from this, and also does anyone know what the brown material is that's mixed in the quartz?? Thanks in advanced!!!

























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[pmgsourdough]

Iron? The ugly mother of gold? Nice hardrock brother. Best of luck.

 

[tridge800]

Thanks pmgsourdough, but I'm almost positive its not iron..this stuff is a milk chocolate brown and soft. Layered kinda like mica and some with a slight reflectiveness if broken and exposed. Its very much harder than mica but def softer than iron..idk!!!

 

[smokeythecat]

Hematite, a variety of iron, can be very soft and crumbly. It's iron that's well on it's way to good old dirt.

 

[Astrobouncer]

I cant tell much from the pics, but it sounds like limonite most likely after pyrite. It also sounds like your ore is what is called refractory (google refractory ore) and you must treat the sulfides first to recover the majority of the gold. This can be done many ways, but the most economical is probably going to be grinding to powder then roasting. Keep in mind you are going to have lots of nasty stuff in those fumes so you don't want to breathe them. After the roast you could use almost any method of gravity separation such as a miller table or a shaker table to keep costs down. I am sure some here will tell you to use a leech/smelt/ mercury recovery based system but all that is more dangerous to use then the stuff I mentioned.

 

[tridge800]

Thanks Astro..will def look into that!!!

 

[Fullpan]

I agree with Astrobouncer - many hard rock mines went belly-up due to "refactory ore" although assays showed good values.

 

[LP13]

Looks like hematite to me too. One of the iron oxides. (Hematite is Iron oxide III - Fe2O3 Magnetite is Iron oxide II,III - Fe3O4). Very common around here. Soft and crumbly when it's on the surface. Only slightly magnetic. You need a neodymium magnet to pick it up. Take apart an old dead hard drive from a computer. They have 2 really powerful neodymium magnets in them. I bet you can pick up specks of the brown stuff then.

 

[B H Prospector]

The Homestake Gold Mine in Lead SD mined refactory ore from about 1880 until it closed in 2002. It pulled millions on dollars from it in that time but cost over ran the price of gold. Bet they wish they could open it back up now. They used the leaching proccess. I toured the mine in 1993 down to the 6800 ft level on a special tour they gave to the company I worked for at the time. We did a lot of equipment repair for them. It was very cool tour. Your ore looks alot like the type of ore they were mining at the time.

 

[tridge800]

Cool B H, I appreciate it..so from what it sounds like, doing anything with this on a small scale as far as processing any of this stuff wouldn't be cost effective?? There is an estimated 10-20k tons of tailings on this property that is hate to see just go to waste..also 2 incline shafts that we are working on accessing eventually. With the assay figures, it just makes me sick to think it wouldn't be worth at least trying to extract the gold and other metals from this..

 

[Goodyguy]

Been working an 1800's tailings, i am personal friends with the land owner and he recently had several pieces of ore and drill core samples assayed with good results..I have crushed several samples and have not found much free milling gold, but my pan was almost completely full with pyrite. From the assay samples showing almost 1oz PT gold, 6oz PT Silver, 11oz PT copper and small amounts of Platinum and Cobalt. I am thinking that the gold must be locked up in the pyrite. What is the best and most economical way of extracting the precious metals from this, and also does anyone know what the brown material is that's mixed in the quartz?? Thanks in advanced!!!

You might try these folks........ they will buy the ore from you and do the refining and you get paid.
Contact Us. We buy gold black sand concentrates, gold ore, and silver ore.

 

[TerryC]

Heap leach method is best bang for your buck.... but that is not to say it is easy. TTC

 

[Sawyer]

I am not sure that any form of recovery would be profitable considering the costs and amount of time invested, however you could have a ton of fun trying!