This is Jason Gaber with Mt Baker Mining and Metals, and today we’ve had a customer send
us some incinerated IC chips. And they’ve been screened to 80 mesh minus, and so we’re
going to run them on our small two foot by four foot shaker table here.
Add some jet dry to the mix. A paint stirrer works great for mixing up the material.
Now the very fine ash material is working its way right down across the table into the
tailings trough. And we’ve got another bunch of material, once that black smoky light stuff
is gone, there’s some darker larger particles coming across, and then some silvery shiny
particles coming across. And in the top groove, we’ve got the gold coming across, and it’ll
end up here under the water bar on the left-hand side of the table.
This actually gives us a pretty good idea here. We’ve got a nice gold line right here
under the water bar. The lower specific gravity material is getting washed down behind it
into the next groove, into the next groove, and into the safety groove, and the excess
is pouring down into the concentrates or middlings trough. And all of the high grade and some
of the safety groove is coming off into the high-grade trough which is where we’re going
to capture, historically, 95% plus of the gold in that end trough.
Okay we’ve stopped the table, and you can see the striations again. Lots of nice gold
on the far left of the table, it’s coming out of the top groove. And as it comes across
the top, the lower specific gravity material gets flushed down the table to the right,
and the gold gets flushed, transported over to the left, under the water bar. The table
keeps trying to push the gold to the left, and the water keeps trying to push the gold
to the right, so it all concentrates right there in a line, and then down here into the
concentrates trough, the high grade trough.
There’s probably less than 3 gallons per minute to run this table. It doesn’t take
very much. And in this scenario it’d be really easy to circulate the water. There’s
no bump in this table, no jerk in the table, it’s a very smooth action. One of the features
for catching fine gold is the grooves, another is the low slope of the table. And then just
the very gentle action of the table that moves everything over to the left. It’s a very
gentle and smooth process, so you create as little turbulence as possible.
There we go, and out of the bottom of the bucket, that’s where a lot of the gold was.
So much gold there at the end, that we’re filling up our top couple of grooves there.
This is the thickest gold line we have seen. Much of the material, much of the gold had
settled to the bottom of the bucket. So it’s coming across, going into our high grade trough.
Now after we’re done emptying the bucket, we let the table run for a while. There’s
still enough material that we need to brush down the grooves, to get the materials down
to the proper troughs. So, you can see all the gold pooled up at the end of that groove
that gets swept out. And I’m sure there’s some down in the grooves below that. There
at the end there was quite a bit of gold at the bottom of the bucket. So it overflowed
the first couple grooves and actually ended up in the third, fourth, or even fifth grooves.
So as you brush that across, you’ll be able to see it come out the end of the grooves
and under the water bar.
Now we’re going to pan out the number one high grade hole. And what we’re finding
is that whatever the black material was in here, it must be a high specific gravity,
because the panning process isn’t separating the gold from the black material well. It’s
intermingled, we’re able to separate to some extent, and we can concentrate it quite
a lot. This is going to need a little treatment to get the 24 karat gold out of it.
We’ve found out the middlings and the concentrates hole now, and there is a little crescent in
the crease of the pan there, and typically that’s about 5% of the total gold that comes
off the table, with the rest in the high grade hole.
And now we’ve got a big blob of the tailings. I expect most of this is ash but I’m not
sure.
These are the panning results from the tailings, we panned about a third of the tailings and
this is what we got. I think you can see it there; there’s just a very very light dusting
of gold wire, very fine gold wire off the chips up there. And that’s way less than
1% of the total gold recovered from the table. So the table did a real good job of recovery.
There are a few things we can try changing to recover this little bit of fine gold. This
table has been set up for ore, and so the slope may be a little bit too much. The water
flow may have been a little too high. And the slurry mixture for the IC chips may have
had not quite enough water, so it comes out as a big glob, and doesn’t have time to
stratify on the table before it gets washed off, because of the slope and the water.
So I think we can recover most of this fine gold that we lost in this first pass, with
table tuning, but I thought I’d give you the full picture of how it went and the little
bit of gold we lost. Again it’s way less than 1%. So thanks for watching and we’ll
catch you on the next one. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and comment.