BrisJoe
Joe
Me and Tymor hit up Clermont GPA's with our detectors today.
Didn't have any luck with nuggets, but found some old working along the way not listed on the maps.
After a while we went exploring and came up to one of the dams and I decided to do a test pan of the tailings piles on the edge of the dam from when the pit was a working mine about 2 decades ago or so.
I just grabbed a couple of shovels into my 1/4" sieve from sorta near the base of the piles but noware near the base of it. I just did a quick pan off not really expecting much but came up with about 4-5 specs to much surprise.
Spot noted to come back with my Walbanker once it's built and do some serious processing of those tailings.
After lunch we went to another less visited GPA to hit a producing patch, only to arrive to find the entire area had been gridded and cleaned out with endless amounts of detector holes and scrapings as far as we could see.
None the less we had a secondary reason to be in the spot. Out come the shovels, hoes and 30L buckets and sieves to dig up the spot that previously 9 nuggets had come from the 1m2 spot so we could process it later for residual and fine gold.
So we chugged away for the arvo digging, scrapping and sieving down the dirt in a couple of buckets to 1/4 mesh size.
So now I have about 80kg of classified dirt sitting in my car to be processed at my leisure. Better spend this week and my upcoming long weekend to build my dry blower.
Here is a test pan from the top of 1 of the buckets. Really fine, and the clay base in the soil adds that extra skill level into the panning.
Bit hard to see, but those with magical photo editing abilities might be able to make it clearer
[EDIT] cleaned up the photo a bit to bring the colours out some more, might not be a million $ pan but it's really not as colourful as the pictures looks like]
Original photo..
Cleaned up photo just playing with sharpness and curves to make the photo clearer
Didn't have any luck with nuggets, but found some old working along the way not listed on the maps.
After a while we went exploring and came up to one of the dams and I decided to do a test pan of the tailings piles on the edge of the dam from when the pit was a working mine about 2 decades ago or so.
I just grabbed a couple of shovels into my 1/4" sieve from sorta near the base of the piles but noware near the base of it. I just did a quick pan off not really expecting much but came up with about 4-5 specs to much surprise.
Spot noted to come back with my Walbanker once it's built and do some serious processing of those tailings.
After lunch we went to another less visited GPA to hit a producing patch, only to arrive to find the entire area had been gridded and cleaned out with endless amounts of detector holes and scrapings as far as we could see.
None the less we had a secondary reason to be in the spot. Out come the shovels, hoes and 30L buckets and sieves to dig up the spot that previously 9 nuggets had come from the 1m2 spot so we could process it later for residual and fine gold.
So we chugged away for the arvo digging, scrapping and sieving down the dirt in a couple of buckets to 1/4 mesh size.
So now I have about 80kg of classified dirt sitting in my car to be processed at my leisure. Better spend this week and my upcoming long weekend to build my dry blower.
Here is a test pan from the top of 1 of the buckets. Really fine, and the clay base in the soil adds that extra skill level into the panning.
Bit hard to see, but those with magical photo editing abilities might be able to make it clearer
[EDIT] cleaned up the photo a bit to bring the colours out some more, might not be a million $ pan but it's really not as colourful as the pictures looks like]
Original photo..
Cleaned up photo just playing with sharpness and curves to make the photo clearer
