Originally Posted by
sawmilleng
Alloy,
I could be wrong here, but chasing flour gold in the Fraser river, at least in my understanding, is a tough go. You are getting gold particles so small that they weigh less than the sand grains around them and therefore are hard to separate.
Centrifugation is simply increasing gravity on the sand/gold mix, but if the gold particles weigh less than the surrounding (larger) sand grains then putting everything under increased gravity doesn't change much.
It seems to me that pretty much all you can expect is separation into "black sand", which you have already established contains platinum and palladium. (and whatever gold is there, too.) Not sure of the processes necessary to extract beyond that...presumably chemical or heat. And I don't know the economics.
It is probably why not much gold mining is done on the Fraser.
There still seems to be some interest in the Barkerville area, though, where gold still can be found in larger chunks. I'm working in Quesnel for a bit and a guy on the contractor's crew here just quit for the summer to go work his placer lease up towards Barkerville. I had talked to him a bit about it and definitely the gold size is better than the Fraser.
Good luck!! and keep us posted!! As always, your posts are very interesting.
Jon.
Thanks for the heads up on centrifuges, I have the technical drawings for the HY-G from the small 7 inches baby up to the large 38 inch 40 horse power monster that consumes a whopping 330 gallons of water per minute.
Centrifuges do have their limitations.
I don't mind river sand the Jar on the left is brown mud is gold, I have yet to be filter this out and melt it into a button that I've giving to my daughter on Friday she wants to buy a mac laptop. I don't think the button will cover the full purchase price but that's why girls have dads to pick up the slack.
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