💬 Discussion: Mercury Free Concentration Methods

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mbasko

Matt
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This morning I found a speci while out checking out new ground. We wanted to see what was inside so I made a fire and heated it to nearly red and dropped it into a bucket of water. That fractured the quartz and made crushing easy.

Speci crushed.jpg

We've been collecting a few so it was time to turn them into gold :)

View attachment Rock crusher.mp4

The rock crusher is a bit of an unfinished project so it was a good opportunity to give it a trial run. The result was better than I'd hoped for. I could have started with bigger particles and then gone for a second pass but I just ran it as I'd left it when I first put it together and the biggest particles turned out to be balls of gold about 3mm so that was good enough.

Sluice3.jpg

Then I ran the crushed rock over the Dream Mat in the sluice. (this photo was a previous run)

Gold 1.jpg

After panning I sorted the gold into two lots because it was a bit too much for me to melt easily in one go. See how the crusher rolled the gold into balls.

Gold 2.jpg

I cleaned the bigger gold out but all this fine stuff went straight into the crucible.

View attachment Crucible.MOV

I need to make or get a furnace because I like to do this in the open air but I have trouble keeping the gold hot enough to pour properly.

Ingot.jpg

The new mould works nicely.

View attachment Gold mould.mp4

A little sprinkle of engineer's chalk releases the gold from the mould.

View attachment Gold mould 2.mp4

Gold 5.jpg

And that's the total of the gold from the species that Mrs M gave me this morning. I might collect a few of these gold buttons together later to tidy up but I've had fun today and that's what counts.
 
Excellent result Phil and I have the same dinner set so please send me some Gold Buttons to garnish my salad🤣🤣🤣🤣😜 Never toss away a rock that gives a good reading. Mackka

Mackka, the GPX6000 screams at hotrocks so some days I've kicked dozens aside without even checking them. You crack a couple and then you have an idea what they look like and from then on, sometimes several to the metre, you just have to kick them aside. Merv and I spent more than a week recently with hundreds of hotrocks and only one nugget. I swapped to the GPX4500 and he changed to the GPZ7000 just because of the hotrocks.

For that reason alone I'm interested to see how the Garrett Axiom performs with its dual ground balance.
 

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