hey guys my name is jason with mount baker mining and metals and i was invited by planet gold to
present at one of their virtual conferences this year and so i want to make a video today
showing the process of taking raw gold ore like in this bag behind me running it through one of our
turnkey systems and then taking the concentrates off our shaker table and using a process called
cupillation and also direct smelting to recover the gold using uh mercury free and chemical free
methods so a quick look at the ore here this is a quartz ore that has some free gold in it but also
it has quite a bit of sulfides that we're going to have to deal with once we get it concentrated down
so let's start by processing this ore through our 110 per hour turnkey system and then we'll take a
look at the concentrates the whole process starts here with our primary jaw crusher
and the ore is fed into this vibrating hopper which vibrates the ore down into the crusher
where it's crushed down to about 10 to 15 millimeters in size it's discharged
onto the conveyor that brings the material the crushed material up into this holding bin here
where the material can be evenly fed out the bottom of the bin using this magnetic feeder
once the material is fed onto the next conveyor belt it travels up to our secondary crusher
which is a hammer mill the hammer mill is injected with water on the sides of the case there that
you can see the material is fed down the top and inside that case are rotating hammers and a screen
around the bottom of the hammer mill which holds the quartz ore
inside the mill to get hit and crushed by the hammers until it can pass through the screen this
hammer mill produces a grind size of approximately 70 percent passing 30 mesh and 50 passing 50 mesh
the slurry then travels down the orange chute into the distributor trough on our shaker table
the shaker table does not use any chemicals it is only water and gravity
the gold and the other heavy minerals such as the sulfides are caught in the grooves
of the shaker table the sulfides and other heavy minerals come down and report to the
number three port as a middling fraction anything that's caught in the grooves moves
over to the left-hand side of the table onto the cleaning plane where the gold can be separated
from the majority of the sulfides and other dense minerals by the action of the table and water
the gold and all the high grade concentrates come down into the number one and number two port
and the quartz and other gang minerals has a very low density and so it is washed down
into the tailings trough of the shaker table by the action of the shaking
and the water and all the tailings report into this dewatering screw
that augers the material up the trough and into a white holding bag
in this system the water is completely recirculated so there is no discharge
into the environment we use a roughly 10 000 liter tank that recirculates
the water and the very fine material that goes into the tailings pond from the screw
settles down into the basin and the clean water is then pumped back onto the shaker
table into the hammer mill for reuse this entire system is run with a three-phase generator
and the whole system takes about 25 kilowatts of power to run at full capacity
we do have other smaller equipment that can be used for operators with smaller budgets or
less material to process these include a 16 by 12 hammer mill run by a honda gasoline engine
discharging either onto a 4x8 shaker table
or down a fine gold recovery sluice box for more information on our turnkey systems
or our modular units or individual pieces of equipment please visit our website at
mbmllc.com you can also find many more videos on our youtube channel we just finished our run
i've cleaned off the shaker table with the brush i've brushed down all the concentrates
out of the riffles that were left down into the number one and the number two concentrates
we've transferred the number one concentrates to a gold pan and i'm going to show you first
my preferred method for cleaning up these concentrates so here's our gold we recovered
and now i'm going to take a small snuffer bottle and i'm just going to suck out some
of it to demonstrate the direct compelling method but i'm going to leave some of the
gold in there for the direct smelting method so for the direct compelling method you want to get
the gold as clean as you can if you get a little bit of the sulfides with it that's okay but i'm
just gonna take a snuffer bottle just like this one and i'm gonna suck up the fairly clean gold
into the snuffer bottle and if i was gonna do this to completion i would keep panning it down
sucking up the gold keep panning it down sucking up the gold until there was no more free gold
okay i'm gonna take the material on our stuffer bottle and i'm gonna uh drain it siphon it out
through this rag it's just a paper towel a shop rag i'm going to shake the gold
down to the tip here and i don't know if you can see
but the tip of the snuffer bottle is filled with gold now i'm just going to
wash the gold from the tip of the snuffer bottle down into the little cone that i've made in the
paper towel and you can see there there's uh mostly free gold there's a little bit of
darker specks in there but i'm going to repeat this process until i have all the gold out of
the sniffer bottle i take the rag out of the little cup here and i just ring the excess water
out of the rag now i can take my scissors cut off the excess rag now we have our
our free gold and a little bit of sulfides down here that we can now refine today i'm going to
show an alternate method if you don't have access to pre-made qpells i'm going to make
a cupel this is simply portland cement that will refine the gold bead into a precious metal button
and remove all the base metals and i'm just making a little bit of a depression
in the top of the cement and this is where we're going to place our bismuth and gold pouch this
process can also be done with lead but because of the harmful effects of lead i like to go with
bismuth and bismuth is very benign actually to to human health as well as the environment
and there's a little precious metal bead and here's our precious metal bead
and it's clean on the bottom it's nice and shiny sometimes if they turn discolored or
if they have a little matte finish on them it means you need to add a little bit more
bismuth but this one turned out pretty good so there's an example of the direct compelling method
now for the rest of this material we're going to direct smelt it and i'm going to dry it out in
a little frying pan i'm not necessarily going to roast it i'm just going to dry it out all right so
we have 100 grams of our material so i'm going to add 50 grams of anhydrous borax or borax to this
if you're using hydrated borax you should use about one part or 100 grams but if you
have anhydrous you can use 50 and for soda ash i'm going to add 200 i'll probably add 20 grams
of lead oxide we have all our ingredients mixed together and this thing down the middle is just
a piece of iron or steel and this is going to reduce all the base metal sulfides to iron sulfide
and it'll all collect down at the bottom here in a metallic form and then we'll pour it in our cone
mold then we'll chip the slag off the metal button and we'll keep hell the button away leaving us our
precious metal bead there it is down the bottom of our furnace we're gonna fire it at about 1200
degrees celsius for about 20 minutes after it all becomes molten and because we're using so much
soda ash i'm going to bring it up to temperature slowly so it doesn't boil over in the crucible
here's our cone mold it's cooled down a little bit
and so i'll get a hammer there should be a metal cone little metal tip right here
so there it is so we decomposed all of our sulfides because there's no mat on top of
the button so there's our metal button i'll get it cleaned up a little bit and we'll go put it in our
electric compelling furnace with the real keypad
and we'll refine our gold out of it so i didn't know how big of a bead we were gonna get so i
put two cupels in here one big one and one small one this thing only weighs probably about 15 grams
so we're gonna put it in the small one here let's check in our q pal
oh yeah there's our little button
we'll get that guy cool down and take a look at it so here's our little button and again it's
got a nice smooth shiny surface it's mostly uh shiny gold color so there's very little silver
and it's separated from the cupel very nice and cleanly which means uh it got most of the base
metals out if you still have a bunch of base metals it'll have a bunch of junk in the bottom
sometimes but there's our second button from our direct smelting so thanks everyone for watching
sorry i couldn't go into more detail i'm sure you guys have a lot more questions such as
roasting or oxides versus sulfides or how much can you smelt and collector
metals there's just lots more to cover um but i didn't have time on today's video to do that
but i have covered a lot of those things on my other youtube videos on my youtube channel
and so if you search mbm llc on youtube you can find a whole bunch more smelting videos and
hopefully some answers to your questions so thanks again for watching and we'll see on the next video