Well we built this shaker table for processing pulverized hard rock quartz ore. And hard
quartz has a significant percentage of heavy concentrates in the form of sulfides and telurides,
in the neighborhood of five to ten percent. So once we grind up the ore, we’re going
to run it across the table, and the primary goal is to separate the blonds, the 95% quartz
light material, from the heavier cons, and we’re going to run those into a separate
bucket, ship those to the refiner. And a secondary goal is to get as much free gold out of the
pulp as we can, so that we get gold in the vial, and we don’t have to send it to the
refiner and wait for the money and pay the commission as well.
So we’re going to run this with some quartz that’s probably in the range of 20 to 100
mesh. It has about 5 or 8% heavy black sand in it and we’re going to show you the separation,
the table does a really good job of separating the blonds from the concentrates. And then
in another clip we’ll show you up closer how the free gold is actually separated. So
we’re going to turn this on and get this going.
You want to do a shovel at a time?
Yeah, a shovel at a time, let’s see how it goes.
There is a step right here in this table, it comes over to this crease, the table slopes up and that’s where the blonds stop.
The table is shaking, the grooves in the table capture the heavy material, and transport
it to the left. Everything comes to the left, but the blonds stop, and the heavies then
come up the ramp in the grooves, across this ramp, and there’s another step here.
And we’re going to get a closer look at the step.
So you can see that the line where the vast majority of the blonds stop, and over here
to the left we get a little blonds carry over. And to the left of that are some denser materials
than the blonds, it shows up a little purple there, that might actually be some gnome garnet.
And to the left of that, right in here, is heavy black sand, hematite, magnatite, some
of it is magnetic. Here’s some of the garnet, and a little carry over of the blonds. But
then here is the bigger picture of where all the blonds are going. Into the paling trough.
We’ve got one drain here for the blonds. And another drain here for the concentrates.
This is pretty early in the process. We’re not sure the optimal feed rate, or tilt or
water, but we’ve experiemented enough that this works pretty well.
This is about half lead and half black sand. And he’s feeding it over there. You probably
can’t tell in the video but it’s coming across mostly in the top four inches of grooves.
Everything is going in the first slope. You can see there’s nothing staying below the
first step. And then it’s coming across here, hitting the second step, and you can
see the ruby sands, the black sands, the lead, and then walking up the grooves. What we’ve
got is lead flowing down to the right, and gold flowing off to the left. And the gold
flowing off to the left flows down and is captured in this groove right here, which
is almost pure clean gold. You can see it coming out the end there, and across into
the next groove. Some of the bigger pieces just shoot on across there, there goes one
now. The smaller pieces and the pieces you see coming out the end here, these pieces
of gold are in the neighborhood of 100 mesh to 200 mesh, and they’re coming across this
groove here as a solid gold line, without much contamination.
We’re still in the developmental stage of this table, and so we’re trying to figure
out where to put the gold drain. And I think we’re going to have two or three of them.
But we have yet to figure out where all that goes. And you can see here on the table, the
build up of gold in the corner here. And this table’s been running, and there’s
a slug of led coming down, into the three. That’s the biggest piece of gold right there
coming to the end of the groove, and it just shoots on across, and gets hung up, it’s
not going to make it down to the next groove. And it’s pretty well cleaning up now, pretty
much basically all our gold has ended up in the left hand side of the table, and all of
our lead down below it, out the drain. And this is what we call our con strain.