What is the easiest way to seperate gold dust from river sand?
herbie q asked:
I have seen people seperate gold nuggets from river sand by panning it. How can you get the smaller dust seperated without useing a pair of tweezers and a magnafine glass one dust particle at a time.
I have seen people seperate gold nuggets from river sand by panning it. How can you get the smaller dust seperated without useing a pair of tweezers and a magnafine glass one dust particle at a time.
a screenpan
Once you pan it down to the black sand concentrates, you swirl and flip the sand out witha little bit of water…it takes practice. The gold will remain in the small crevice. theother way to do it is use a little eye dropper to suck te gold up and away from the sand if you spread it outi n the pan.
Add mercury. The gold will form an amalgam with the mercury, and you can pour it. You put the mercury/gold amalgam in a crucible and heat it, which drives off the mercury, leaving behind the gold.
Then you go to “heavy metal chelation therapy” to reduce the mercury toxicity in your body, and you spend the rest of your life in lawsuit h*ll because you improperly disposed of toxic metal mercury in a wetland environment.
There are several ways. Some that work well that are dangerous and should not be used employ mercury or nitric acid. In many cases, these methods are illegal due to the environmental damage as well as the dangers they pose to people.
Many amateur miners use a snifter bottle to suck the visible gold flakes out, then keep the rest of the “black sand” until the end of the season and run it through a concentrator wheel to remove even more of the gold. Often they burn their miner’s moss at this time and process the fines left from that. also. “Black sand” commonly contains other valuable metals like platinum, silver, uranium, etc and is worth saving and having assayed. It can usually be sold as it is if it contains decent quantities of metals.
There are a lot of methods for getting fine gold, but your basic gold pan is still one of the best. Classify your concentrates down to 30 to 50 mesh or so and pan small amounts at a time. Use a snuffer bottle to suck up the visible gold.
After you’ve panned it all down, empty your snuffer bottle into a clean pan with about an inch and a half to two inches of water. Get all the material to the edge of the pan and slowly swirl the water with your finger moving towards the center. Whatever blacksands you sucked up with your gold will move towards the center of the pan leaving the gold around the edge. Works great.
Suck up the gold again, remove the straw from the snuffer and replace cap, tip upside-down into a vial and swirl. You’ve now got a vial full (hopefully) of gold dust.
Save the heavies you panned off. They contain micro gold and flour you missed when panning. When you get enough, send it off to a refinery and get that gold too.
We carry snuffer bottles, vials, classifiers, etc if you’re not sure where to get that stuff.
Good luck!