Hey guys my name is Jason and Mount Baker Mining and Metals
and today we're in Northeast Africa checking out some of our older equipment.
So they have an older 16 inch by 12 inch hammer mill here that feeds down onto
one of our 4 by 8 shaker tables and then behind that they have a smaller 12
inch by 9 inch hammer mill that they've been running into one of these APT gold
caches. And they've been having really good luck processing both raw ore from
the mine as well as recovering mercury and gold from the tailings from the
current wet pan mills, which you can see behind in the distance there.
Here's our 4 by 8 shaker table, and now we've adjusted it so the fall is a
quarter inch per foot towards the tailings trough and the grooves are
level parallel with the grooves.
So here's the inside of our 16 by 12 hammer mill and the hammers are
brand-new, they're the, an older-style high chrome hammer. And then there's the screen, the lid here.
So here's some very fine gold that was recovered from the tailings. Alright the
sun set, we're losing our light but we're gonna try and smelt these concentrates
from the shaker table today. And right now we have them roasting over a fire or
the furnace actually, and there's a little bit of water that's boiling off
and we're gonna roast them real good and get them all oxidized and then mix them
with some borax and smelt them and all crucible. You know the sun's going down
and roasted our stuff, it's in the furnace small probably a number two
crucible maybe a number three crucible. We don't have a cone mold here so we're
gonna use a bar mold, we'll tip it about 45 degrees try and get a cone down in the
corner. This is gonna be our little cone mold here, it's a five kilogram bar mold.
And now we're gonna tip it about 45 degrees and pour it down into that corner.
And we've got this steel pan in case any of the slag overflows, which it's gonna
be close I think it might be able to catch all the slag and hopefully our gold will go
right down to the bottom of the cone.
So our smelting kind of worked, we didn't have a proper cone mold and so we
ended up getting all these little gold beads instead. And so they're gonna work
on making a cone mold and then all the gold will collect down into one single
bead instead of flowing out and mixing into a bunch of little tiny beads.
So you know we smelted the sulfides recovered the gold it just isn't in the
in the shape we want. So they're gonna work on getting a cone mold and should
should do better for him. So last night after we left, this guy resmelted our
fine gold beads and made a little cone and he recovered two little beads of
gold. So just by kind of judging off the cuff here that's probably around a gram
or maybe a little bit less. So this is as far as I know the first successful field
smelting test of mercury free gold. So that's pretty cool. Here with the gold
buyer and we're weighing our gold looks like it's about half a gram. The scale
doesn't go down to a very accurate
weight for that little bit of gold. But yeah we recovered half a gram from what -
sacks, not very many sacks. So we're at one of these cone mill sites and we notice
these guys are all covered and soot, so he came over and asked them what they're
doing and at the mining site they stack tires up
against the vein and light the tires on fire to heat up the vein and it cracks
the vein. And then they bring the rock down and put it in these cone mills with
about a kilogram of mercury to recover the gold. But all the tire ash comes with
the ore and you have bits of tire and rubber and all the rubber chemicals that
get mixed in with the ore.
Then out here is their tailings pond and it's just a tire sludge pond, just full of
tire ash. I've never quite seen anything like this before,
but this has got to be one of the most toxic mining practices I've ever seen.
Not only do you have the mercury, but now they're burning tires that are full of bad chemicals. We've moved to
another site farther north in the country and they're also running a 16
inch by 12 inch hammer mill down onto one of our 4 by 8 shaker tables. And the
customers are testing the recovery of our shaker table and hammer mill against
some of their sacks of ore comparing it to the wet pan mills in using mercury.
And what they found is our system recovers about two to three times more
gold than the wet pan mills and mercury, which only recover about 30 to 40
percent of the gold, whereas we can recover about 85% with our table. Here
you can see the gold collecting in the top three grooves of the table and once
it cascades down into the fourth groove it works its way up onto the cleaning
plane under the water bar and then down into the number 1 and number 2 port for a
final collection and smelting.
Here's a shot of some of the fine gold against the black matte of the shaker
table and you can see just how fine it is. Here's a shot of the gold in a gold
pan with a little bit of sulfides and then the final product here after
smelting. And this final picture is me holding a 10 kilogram gold bar. This is
by far the most gold I've ever held in my hands at any one time. So I hope you
guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching and we'll see on the next one.