Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and today we
wanted to do another demonstration of our turnkey ore system. This is our one
ton per hour system and I want to walk you through the system and then we can
take a look at some of the ore we're going to be running and then we'll fire
up the system and see what we get. So it starts here with this jaw crusher
module, and the ore will be dumped into the hopper here. The hopper vibrates down
and feeds this 8 by 12 jaw crusher which crushes it down to about one inch or 3/4
inch minus. It discharges down onto this conveyor behind me, brings the material
crushed up into this fine ore hopper. The fine ore hopper is really a holding bin but
it also allows us to meter the feed up to the hammer mill very evenly.
Underneath there's a feeder that you can adjust the rate of feed, which meters the
feed onto this conveyor up into the 16 by 12 hammer mill here. This hammer mill
right now has 20 chrome hammers in it and a 0.8 millimeter slotted screen. And
at this size screen about 70% of the material passes 30 mesh and about 50%
passes 50 mesh. We run it wet so it forms a really nice slurry. It'll discharge
down here onto our shaker table, this is one of our 4 by 8 shaker tables rated at
1 ton per hour. The quartz and other gang material will flow off into the number 4..
The heavy dense sulfides and gold will be caught in these grooves, come up under
the water bar. Once it reaches up here under the water bar, the water washes the
sulfides away that do make it up onto the cleaning plane leaving a nice clean
line of gold that comes down into the number 1 and number 2 concentrates. The
shaker table has two safety grooves at the bottom that run all the way across
and this will capture anything that doesn't quite make it up into the
cleaning plane into the number one. So the number one and number two are where
most your values are going to be. There's a number three port here that the
sulfides will form a band at the end of the grooves and it will work its way
down into the number three middlings bucket here. The tailings are set up to
flow into a spiral classifier, and the spinal classifier has a little settling
basin here. The quartz particles that settle down through that basin are
augered out and dewatered into a super sac there that can be either rerun for
liberating more gold if there's enough values or they can be, they're dewatered
and so they're a lot easier to deal with and it doesn't fill up your tailings
pond. Tight now we have the spiral classifier set on the finest setting so
somewhere around 150 or 200 mesh material is sent to the final tailings
pond. This is a concrete basin we've buried here for our water and we can
recirculate the water through the system continuously so you don't have to have
fresh water to run the system. The shaker table takes between five and seven US
gallons a minute to operate and we added another one or two US gallons to the
hammer mill, so altogether this whole system runs on less than 10 gallons a
minute of water and again which can all be recirculated. So let's go take a look
at the ore we're going to be running and then we'll get this thing fired up. So
here's some of the ore we're going to be running today and this is a quartz
hydrothermal vane ore. It has free gold and a little bit of sulfides in it and
we'll talk about that in a minute. But we have about sixty buckets of this stuff
to run and we weighed 5 or 6 of them and it averages about 65 pounds, so we're
running somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 pounds for this sample. But let me
show you some of the ore here we're talking about. These streaks you can see
here are the sulfides associated with the ore. The main sulfide and this ore is
a pyrrhotite, which is an iron sulfide, there's a
little bit of pyrite and a little bit of chalcopyrite, but other than that it's
pretty much quartz and a little bit of sulfides and there's some free gold in
here as well.
Okay here's the number one bucket that we got off the table, I've panned it
down a little bit. But you can see in the sun it's a pretty good showing there, a
lot of fine gold. Again this was from about 3500 pounds of ore and this is the
number one. So we're gonna take the number two and rerun it and probably got
about two or three gallons of number two that we're gonna rerun on the shaker
table and upgrade it even more and then we'll pan that down and see what that
looks like. Okay so we wanted to show you kind of what we ended up with after our
run. These are the number three kind of middlings and this is the sulphide rich
middlings that came off the table. And we ended up with two buckets of these. And
so I've cleaned out the number three here, this yellow bucket is empty and
I've taken that all the number two and number one away. And right now we have
three of these tubs of number two. And the number two is real heavy sulfides
and we're gonna show you now... the number one, it was easy you can just pan it out
a little bit and you can see the gold but now for the number two we're gonna
turn the tail back on and I'm going to clean up the number two and get a high
grade number one with mostly gold, a little bit in number two but most of
these sulfides are going to end up going down to number three middlings where
we'll catch. Okay so what we're doing now is we're taking our number two and we're
rerunning it on our shaker table to clean it up. And so there's a lot of
sulfides in here with a little bit of gold and we want to get rid of most of
the sulfides so we don't have to deal with them. And so we're running them on
the same table that we used for our production run, but we're using the table
now as a finishing table to clean up our gold and eliminate a lot of our sulphide
concentrates. So I'm feeding our number two right down here at the base
of the ramp going down about halfway down the table
and it's forming a nice wide band of sulfides that are running down. And we've
adjusted the splitter and the trough there to capture all the sulfides and
run them back into our number-3 middlings trough, so we're not losing any
of this to tailings this is all worth saving. But our strategy is to get as
much of the free gold out as possible that you can then smelt and sell
directly to a refiner rather than boxing up or putting a bunch of sulfides in a
barrel and sending them off for further processing. You want to get as much free
gold out as you possibly can. Okay here's our very very very fine gold that we
ended up with. This is the number-2 concentrates from our initial run that
we've rerun on the table and this is what came out in the number one port. So
you can see there it sits it's actually not very much gold but it's very very
very fine it makes a really nice-looking crescent in the pan. It's easily 325 mesh
minus,almost all that gold is. Okay so what we're doing now is this is actually
really just a check I've taken a bucket of our number-3
middlings and we're running it back on the table to see if we get any gold. And
in the past we found that 95, 98 percent of the free gold ends up in the number
one and number two so if if we see any gold up here it should be very very very
little and it should be very very very fine. So that's what we're doing here and
if we see any gold we'll get the camera on and and we'll show you what we get. So
we've been running maybe half a bucket of the number three middlings here and
you can see right here on the cleaning plane this is that little band of
sulfides and there is no gold to speak of at all. And so that that tells me that
we ended up with almost a hundred percent of the free
gold ended up in the number one or number two. So any value that's
associated with the number three in this case is going to be locked up in the
sulfides because it's not liberated we're not seeing any free gold on the
table at all. Okay so here's the gold that we got from our table and our run
and we panned it down a little bit but you can see there's there's quite a bit
of gold in there. And this is everything out of our number one and number two
concentrates. And I've got a fanned out so you can see the gold but over on this
side there's still a little pile of black sand that I should be able to
piece of gold on top but there's a little pile of sulfides here and so
we're gonna take all the material in the pan, put it into our cast iron frying pan
and we're gonna roast it over our furnace, drive off the sulfur and then
we're gonna smelt it down into a button. Okay we've got our gold concentrates up
on the furnace there and they're roasting away, they're just about
finished. And so we're going to take them cool them off weigh them out and then
we'll mix up a slag recipe. Okay so here's our 30 grams of high-grade
material from the shaker table. I've mixed 30 grams of silica, 30 grams of
soda ash, 90 grams of borax, and I added a little bit of potassium nitrate this
time to see if we can oxidize and maybe clean up some of that gold a little bit
more. So I'm going to take it take the top off my furnace here,
pour it right in the crucible, put the lid back on and we're ready to go.
Okay so here's our pour in our cone mold, it's cooled down better knock it out in
this steel bin. There's our little button that's starting to show there. So I'll
bust it out of there with a hammer and we'll take a look at what we got. So
there's our button. So I'll get some of the slag knocked off and we'll take a
look and get it weighed. Alright here's our button, I'm gonna get it weighed out
here on our scale and it comes in alright just under 16 grams. So it ended
up being right about 1/4 ounce a ton and that's really a minimum value, I would
actually say that the ore probably is has a little bit higher grade than that
there's probably some value left over in the middlings. And in the future I want
to do a video where I take those that middling fraction and grind it up really
really fine and see if we can liberate any more gold. So stay tuned for that one.
And then I also wanted at the end of the video here answer a question we get a
lot is what grade do you need to make a system like this profitable, and there's
a lot of factors that go into that question but kind of rule of thumb would
be that if you just have a dump pile or tailings or something that's sitting on
the surface you just have to go dig it up, I would estimate that somewhere
around the quarter ounce per ton would would be enough value to make turnkey
system profitable. If you actually have to go underground and do some mining to
get it out you're probably looking at half an ounce plus per ton to make that
profitable. So anyway wanted to throw those out there hope you guys enjoyed
the video and I think it was a great example of being able to take some rocks
and in just a couple hours turn it into a gold button. So you kind of saw the
process from from start to finish there. So thanks for watching hope you enjoyed
it and we'll see on the next video.