Hey guys, my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and today we're gonna
be running a sample of this old slag from an old abandoned gold mine. And this
is slag and actually it looks like there's some matte and here as well.
And the goal is to run it through the one ton per hour turnkey system behind
me, we're gonna crush it up, run it across our table and see if we can liberate any
more values from from this guy's sample. So I'll get it fired up and I'll talk you
through as we go along.
So here's the the three different cuts off the shaker table from that slag
sample. Then here's the little bit of material that came off the number one,
and I'll get this in a pan here we can pan it down and take a look. Here's the
number two, which is mostly matte. And then here is the number three, and we had the
splitter in there and we kind of you know set it. When running these small
samples we've just kind of set it where we think it's going to be, so there's
there's quite a bit of slag still in here, glassy slag, but it's about half
matte half slag. So if you're running in production you can really set that
splitter a little bit better but those are the three cuts and we'll send them
back to him. But let's get this panned down and we'll take a look and see what we
got in the number one. So I'm just panning the the top layer off and then I
shake it back down into the corner, sometimes I'll bring it all the way flat
when I first start.
Yeah when you're finished panning this really fine stuff, I don't even bring the
water much past the crescent and in the pan. You're just trying to slide that
stuff right off the top then you can do 6, 8, 10 dips with the pan and then bring
it back down and shake it all back down to the corner. Patience is the key, don't
want to rush it. You've done all this work and gotten all the way here and
it's a shame to pan out all your fine gold and fool yourself into thinking you
lost a bunch or don't have as much as you did. So take your time and
we're starting to see a little bit of that copper come there at the at the
edge.
So here you've got a little bit of fine gold starting here, and it comes all the
way around and the tail kinda ends right here and then you have the copper
collector in front of that and a little bit of matte. So well we'll get this all
bagged up and send it back to the customer see what he thinks. I saved out a
little bit of that crushed up slag and matte, have about 30 pounds here, and I'm
actually gonna try and just direct melt some with some iron and see if we can
get any metal out. And because it's already been smelted, I'm gonna add a
little bit of borax not as much as I would for virgin material, or virgin
concentrates. So here's my borax, here's my crucible and we'll get this thing
loaded up. Here's our loaded crucible it's got our matte in there and some borax,
it's probably half and half or maybe 2/3 borax in a third matte. So this thing is
going to be put into the crucible here when it gets all molten, and I'm going to
use this as a source of iron and the idea is this thing sits down in the
bottom of the crucible, there'll be a puddle map that'll come up somewhere on
the sacrificial bar and the mat is going to eat away at the iron and the idea is
you may have lead sulfide or copper sulfide, all of which is less reactive
than iron, and so when you have a little piece of molten copper sulfide that
attaches to the steel or touches the steel, the copper is going to switch with
the iron and will turn into copper metal that gets reduced and the iron replaces
the copper with the sulfur and turns into an iron sulphide. And so the the
whole goal is to create a complete matte of iron sulfide and reduce all the more
reactive metals down to a little puddle in the bottom of the crucible and that
way when we pour it into our cone mold we'll get a little puddle of molten
metal that is going to solidify into a little bead that we can then get assayed
and figure out what metal is in this matte. And the iron sulphide that is
created by eating away the steel is a really poor
holder of precious metals, so the ideas is that all the precious metals and all
the base metals less reactive than iron are going to go into that little molten
metal puddle at the bottom. So that's how this is going to work. All right got the
furnace fired up here. You can see there's the one injector, there's the
other one. And got our crucible pretty well
full there. And this thing will get up to well over 2,000 degrees, I've melted
big pots of copper brass in here so I know it will get hot enough.
Okay it's the next day and the poor is cooled down and our cone mold, and so
I'll tip this thing over on the concrete here and let's see what we got. I think
the camera may have got knocked over there, but here's the slag and actually
all of our our good stuff that's still down there in the bottom so let me see I
knock that out of there and see what we got.
So here's our important piece this is the bottom of the cone. And let's see if
I can do this and get it on video at the same time. So let's see if we got
anything in the cone, it looks like a little bit of matte it's left over from
the smelt, but it doesn't look like there's any metallic metal at all. Let me
get it bust up a little bit and we'll see if there's any little beads in there.
So there was a little tiny bit of metal in the very bottom of the cone there.
Let's see if I can get... it looks like it's copper, it's still got some gray slag
attached to it but... right there you can kind of see the
copper. But out of 35 pounds that's the little tiny bit that we recovered so the
old boys did pretty darn good getting all the metal out of their, out of their
matte and out of there slag. So that's the results from our 31 pounds melted down
and re-smelted. Here's our slag, and it is very very glassy. I used only borax like
I mentioned earlier and so it's a real acidic slag which makes it real glassy
if I used a bunch of soda ash, or added a bunch of soda ash it would it
ended up being real dull and kind of stony or not vitreous and glassy like
this. The other thing I learned is I crushed it just through a jaw crusher and tried to smelt
it down that way, most of the time I use that like sand size or powdered material,
and it took forever to smelt that stuff down because it was so big. It's like
melting ice cubes in a cup versus like snow in a cup of water so the
surface area wasn't very big and there were real big pieces. So in the future I
would I would crush it down smaller and make it as small as possible
with a large surface area so it melts quicker in the in the slag or in the in
the crucible. So that's the results of our reprocessing old gold slag, both to
the turkey system and also reprocessing it through smelting. So hope you guys
enjoyed the video, my recommendation for this guy is process through the
turnkey system, get a high-grade concentrate and then smelt it down
because as we saw smelting of the raw slag and matte doesn't produce a whole
lot of metallic fraction or gold. So hope you guys enjoyed the video, please let us
know if you have any questions or comments, all of our information is in
the description below. So thanks for watching and we'll see on the next one.