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Gold Wheels, Gold Cubes, Knudsen Bowls Etc...


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Hi Folks, say you hypothetically :biggrin: had a fair amount of crushed ore to process, and due to the amount of mustard gold in quantities worth recovering, what would you recommend and why?

Water can be a problem so recirculating would be good, portability is a big want, will be using mercury and a retort due to the mustard gold.

Open to suggestions.

 

Many thanks,

 

Steve

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I have some friends that were using a gold wheel for a long time to recover gold from their crushed ore, they switched over to a Gold Cube 4 and loved it, never looked back. Much faster. Less setup time, better recovery.

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Our local club has several members using a Gold Cube after dry washing and some of them use it in or near a stream rather than sluicing!

Mitchel

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I am not sure what "mustard" gold is but I use a Gold cube for my cleanups from beach mining.

The gold we get of the Oregon beaches is depending on which beach you goto anywhere from 80 Mesh down to -200 mesh.

I have a 5 stack Gold cube and I usually rerun the tails from it at least one more time. and still pull a little extra out of them.... It is very fast and if you finish 1 tray at a time the super cons are minimal... Also it doesn't hurt to classify them through screens as well since keeping the cons and the gold as close to the same size makes the final cleanup much easier.... 

Remember the golden rule ............... If everything in the pan is the same size.... Gold rules.

The other cleanup tool you might think about is Goldhog's Multi sluice... it is pretty effective at small gold recovery as well and also fast.

 

You can take a quick look at this thread... Beach mining.

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Get yourself a blue bowl mate, hours of fun ??.

Seriously though, I love my knudsen bowl, it can handle as much as I throw at it at home with freshwater.

When recirculting a 2000gph bilge only just keeps up so slightly larger is better, ignore the ebay crap they dont last, buy a good one.

You probably seen my video with the 2 bins recirculating, the water fouls up after 1 bin load of powder (about 60kg) and needs to be changed.

 

My main reason for getting the knudsen was for processing very similar material, enriched cap with loads of mustard in it.  I found gravity seperation was not much good with gold that fine and the centrifugal force of the knudsen got a lot better recovery.

I consider myself a pretty good panner and from my very bad memory, the first load I put through it was from about 1 ton of powder (crushed with the armstrong mini)that I had panned and got about 13oz, the knudsen got another 1.5oz so I had missed about 10%.

 

Im sure which ever option you chose it will be fun!  Good luck mate.

 

Added video I was talking about.

 

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Get a wheel, you can run it in reverse to amalgamate the gold and mercury then switch the polarity and pull the amalgamate out. Mustard gold is hard to recover without mercury. Don't breath the fumes. Nitric acid can be used to remove the mercury from the gold and then reclaimed from the nitric.

 

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7 hours ago, Hobo said:

 

Get a wheel, you can run it in reverse to amalgamate the gold and mercury then switch the polarity and pull the amalgamate out. Mustard gold is hard to recover without mercury. Don't breath the fumes. Nitric acid can be used to remove the mercury from the gold and then reclaimed from the nitric.

 

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A lot easier to retort the mercury, mecuric nitrate (mercury disolved in nitric acid) is extremely dangerous, 10 times more dangerous then plain mercury.

I have used this method before, using copper plate to recover the mercury back out of the mercuric nitrate, it can then be a real pain in the ass getting the mercury back of the copper.  Not worth the trouble in my opinion when the retort is so easy.

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Retorts are fine if you have one and I don't have a problem with em.  I also have had no problem recovering mercury from nitric. Aluminum foil  put into the diluted nitric drops the mercury out. If tis is dangerous please let me know...

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Thanks for the info guys! and the youtubes, much appreciated.

Yep I have a retort

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