Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and today I
wanted to do a video on roasting and the effects of roasting and why we do it.
So I have a little sample here of some sulfides and I'm gonna pan them out and
show you guys, I can't actually physically pan any more gold out of this
stuff. And then we're gonna roast it and I just want to show you kind of how the
gold gets released and see if we can get any more gold released by
roasting. So this is just going to be really a roasting how-to video and
why we do it, what the effects of roasting are. Okay so here I've got some
of those sulfides in the in a gold pan here. And I'm gonna swirl these around
and show you that there's hardly any gold or no gold that I can pan out of
this and then we'll roast it and see what happens. Okay so I might be kind of hard
to see in the video with the glare and stuff but I've panned the stuff down, you
can see the huge amount of iron sulphide that's in there, the pyrite, a little bit
of black sulphide there at the top but you can see there's there's really no
gold in there, there's no bright yellow line indicating there's any gold I can
pan out. So I'm gonna wash this into our cast iron frying pan and roast it and
then maybe we'll see the gold get released. Here's our little roasting
setup and I have my propane tank feeding this little propane burner here.
It just goes right into my little smelting furnace I've been using and
I've shimmed up the frying pan and I'm just setting the frying pan right over
the the outlet of the furnace. That's all steamed don't worry it's just a bunch of
steam coming off from the water. And so the idea is is that you take the
metal sulphides, you expose them to the oxygen atmosphere at high temperature
and the sulfides convert to oxides which are then soluble in the slag, but they
also hopefully will release some of the gold particles that are locked up in the
sulfide crystals.
Alright we're getting up to temperature here, the sulfides of all kind of turned
black. So you might be able to see it on the video, you can see those fumes coming
off that means we're getting hot enough now. And I only roast it for about 10
minutes, maybe 15 minutes, just until the blue smoke starts coming stops coming
off and then you're ready. Alright so we just pulled our stuff off the the
heat, it's all turned black it's still really quite hot. But you can see this
this actually is all gold right here, all those all those little flecks are gold.
And so I, the roasting actually released those gold flakes from some of
those pieces of pyrite. So here our soul fights back in the pan after we roasted
them they they turn bright red after roasting. And so all pan these out and
see what we get and I'm hoping to to see quite a bit of gold in there judging by
what we saw in the frying pan. Okay so check it out! We've got quite a bit of
gold in there just from roasting. I haven't crushed it, I haven't anything
that's just from the roasting process. So that is that was pretty cool, there's
even still some down here that I missed when I swirled it around the pan. So
that's pretty cool, I didn't think the results were going to be that
dramatic, but it just goes to show you that it's a good way to test your
sulfides, you know, pan on all the gold to get all the free goldthat you can and
then roast a representative sample and it may release some more gold. And so
like I said earlier we get asked a question a lot about why do you need to
roast sulfides or what does the roasting process do and really it releases the
gold from the sulfides so you can recover them.
So thanks for watching our video, I hope you enjoyed it, hope you learned
something. Let us know what you think, otherwise, we'll see on the next one.
Thanks for watching.