Hey guys, this is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and we're jumping right
in here to part two of our series gold panning verses assay. And I'll put a link
to part one up here in the upper right hand corner for you if you want to start
at part one, but right now we're taking our second sample the one that we did
not pan and we're roasting it over our furnace trying to convert all the
sulfides into oxides so that they'll be dissolved
in our slag that we're gonna make with our flux which we'll walk through here
in a minute. The sulfides need to reach a temperature
of a little over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit I kind of shoot for between a
thousand and twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit. So we're a little bit cool
here still but we'll get it up to temperature and make sure it gets all
thoroughly mixed and oxidized. So I got to thinking about it afterwards,
and it would be really easy to take our panning tailings and smelt these down
and see if we can recover any gold out of them.So I think that's what I'll do,
I'll get these I'll get these panning tailings dried out, roast them, and then
we'll smelt these and then we can have a button from our pan and cons and then a
button from the pan and tailings and we can compare those with the smelt of the
original ore. And then we can have a comparison all three so that'll be cool!
So let me get these roasted and ready to smelt. So most of this you're seeing is
the water being driven off from the panning tailings, but it's really
important to wear a respirator when you're doing this because a lot of So2
is driven off which, if you breathe it in, it mixes with the water in your lungs
and turns into sulfuric acid in your lungs so that's something you really want to
avoid. So here's the flux we're going to be using, and this is Chapman's flux and
it's mostly borax soda ash and silica with a little bit of manganese dioxide
as an oxidizer. And I've mixed up about two kilograms of c]Chapman's flux for the
one kilogram of roasted ore that we have and I'm gonna smelt them here in this
number twelve crucible
okay here's our stuff we're getting ready to smelt, I left quite a bit of
room in the crucible for expansion and some boiling. I got a little more here
I'm gonna have to add to the to the crucible after it gets molten and
liquid. And somebody asked me about that the other day and I kind of said well I
know you don't want to do it but here I'm gonna try it so... We'll get this in
the furnace and get it going and then over here we have our panning tailings
that have all been roasted now and we'll get those smelted after this. I'm gonna
add to this or in the bottom of this there's about 300 grams of lead and so
that will act as our collector metal. As the material that gets up to temperature,
it releases a bunch of gas in this particular smelt there's probably a lot
of oxygen coming off the manganese dioxide, but it bubbles and boils and as
it heats up it expands and here's a shot showing that as I zoom in you can
see the the material has expanded and it's about an inch or maybe a little bit
less from the lip of the crucible. So you want to make sure you leave some room in
there for expansion so it doesn't boil over and get all over your furnace. And
then here's a quick shot showing after it's the first initial charge all became
molten the volume reduced quite a bit so then I could add in the little bit of
material I had left over and so we've smelted the full amount.
Okay so here I'm trying to show you that we didn't have any matte layer so it's
just slag, glassy slag, and our nice lead button here so we'll take this and
we'll cupel it and recover the precious metals.
Okay so the first test I used Chapman's flux and Chapman's flux has an oxidizer in
it and the second one I wasn't real happy with it because it was it was
seemed really thick, there was a lot more quartz in this one and so for the second
one I used straight borax. And I ran into a little bit of a problem, I've got a
I've got a matte layer here and that's that artificial sulfide - it's not
artificial, it's just all the sulfides they're not soluble in the slag and
they're not soluble in the metal. So, they make a third phase is what it's called
and it sits between the metal and the slag. So when I use the straight
borax - you kind of like sits like that - when I use the straight borax a little
bit of sulfides that were in there they didn't get roasted in depth on
top of the metal so we got to get rid of that so what I'm gonna do is I'm
going to I'm gonna roast this again, crush it up, roast it. I'm going to use
the same collector metal, put it back in and re-smelt it and hopefully get rid
all this matte all the sulfides will roast off and then we can then
get all of our all of our metal all of our precious metal in with the lead
because whenever you have a matte layer you're gonna lose some precious metals
primarily silver but there's also gold that gets caught in there as well so you
really want to get rid of your matte layer. Here's the 3 cupels we're gonna do
and oxidize our lead this is the material that we didn't pan, so that
should have all the gold in it from that sample that first one kg. This is the
panning tailings and I've got it all smelted down again, I used up the matte so
we've got all of our gold in here if there is any. And then this is a sample
of the lead I use and I'm just gonna cupel this and see if there's any
precious metals in the lead that I'm using just as kind of a check and so if
there's if there ends up being a small amount of precious metals most likely
silver we'll have to remove that from our final
weight at the end. But I'm just gonna do a check here to see if our lead we're using
has any precious metals we have our cupels loaded into this gas furnace and
the goal is to heat the lead up, melt the lead, and then have enough oxygen in the
furnace to oxidize the molten lead, get the temperature up high enough about
1700 degrees so the lead oxide melts and then it's absorbed into the cupels
and as that process continues the lead gets totally sucked up into the
cupel's lead oxide, leaving our precious metals button. But it's a little
bit hard to do in a gas-fired furnace, it's hard to control the temperature and
oxygen flow so I've got to find a little bit better way to run my cupels and
oxidize my lead. And here's our cupels after the lead has been fully oxidized
and you can see our little tiny beads in there. bBut I have another problem
the cupels are actually now stuck to the bottom of the furnace because there
was a little bit of slag left in there so now I have to chip my cupels out of
the furnace. Here's our three beads and this one was the original one that we
smelted from the panning concentrates, and this one is 0.1 grams. This one over
here is the bead from the one kilogram we smelted that we didn't concentrate at
all,and this one weighs 0.16 grams. And this is the little bead from the panning
tailings, and it weighs 0.8 grams. So we recovered almost as much gold as we did
from the original panning here so these two together weigh 1.8 grams
and this one is 1.6 think I just said so
we recovered roughly about the same amount of gold but in this particular ore
it really makes sense to save the concentrates the black sand
and the sulfides because there's a significant amount of gold left in the
sulfides. And here is our
little teeny tiny bead of probably silver that was cupelled from our
straight lead. And it's so small I can't even weigh it on my scale but there is a
little bit of silver in our in our lead so I got to figure out how much that is
and then I got to subtract that from the weight of our of our buttons. But that's
from a 160 grams of roofing lead. So I have our three gold
beads in that little cupel I'm gonna reuse it actually I've already used it
once but I think there's enough capacity there. I'm gonna cupel another ten grams
of lead and I get all those buttons in coalesced into one button. But I'm using
a little electric furnace here and it'll help me control the temperature I can
actually set the temperature it's working its way up it's heating up now
but I can set the temperature so I don't get it too hot and I have a lot more
control and then I can just crack this door to allow the oxygen in and oxidize
the lead when when we're up to temperature. So I'm going to... you see it
the frame rates making the numbers look all goofy... but I'll show you how this
works when you get up to temperature and then we'll take a look at our all of our
gold coalesced into a single bead here after it's all done heating up. We're
just about up to temperature now and the cupel and the lead are lagging behind a
little bit. But it's black, it's all oxidized, and as soon as it gets up to
about 1650 1700 it will start melting and and driving off into the cupel. And
right now we're at 1550 or so. All right we're up to temperature now...
just going to take a peak in there... there's our lead... And well the temperature just
dropped quite a bit because I open the door but we're out about 1750 or so is
temperature of the furnace. And all these fumes you see coming off the cupel
are lead oxide so you really want to be aware of that and wear a respirator and
do it in a very well ventilated area if you're going to be cupelling lead
and oxidizing lead. And there's our bead all coalesced into one. So we'll get it
out of there and check it out.
And when you do the math on that, we ran two kilograms of material ended up with
0.31 grams so you multiply 0.31 by 500 and you end up with a little over
a 150 grams a ton. So that stuff has definitely got some gold in it.
And so I'm gonna have to go back and like I said at the beginning I
definitely hand-picked some stuff that looked good but I'm gonna have to go
back and get a bulk sample and run some of that and see see how much gold is in
the dump pile. So I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching and we'll
see you on the next one