Crush It and Find Out S1E3: Running Placer Cons

本站添加: 2026-05-09

[00:00:05]Hi, my name's Harry and welcome to Mine Operator. In this episode, we're going to be running some concentrates in our system to try to liberate gold. I have Bill. Justin. And Mr. Hollywood.

[00:00:18]So, we're going to go ahead and do a little test here to see if the concentrates are going to do what we think they're going to do in the hammer mill. And if it works out, then we have a whole bunch of cons to run. All right, Mr. Hollywood, look what we got.

[00:00:31]Tons of fun. Tons of fun.

[00:00:36]Oh, you got these properly sealed.

[00:00:44]Nice and quiet.

[00:00:48]So, we're doing our test here.

[00:00:50]We're throwing the cons on the conveyor belt to see how it runs on the table.

[00:01:04]So, there we go. It's sitting back here.

[00:01:09]This is from the mill from the last run.

[00:01:11]That'll clear out and his stuff will push it out of the way.

[00:01:16]We'll check in once we get it on the table.

[00:01:34]The gold is starting to show up after the first bucket.

[00:01:41]And the gold's all running right along the water bar here.

[00:01:44]Right where it should.

[00:01:50]This is looking really good.

[00:01:55]All right, this is after three buckets, cons.

[00:01:59]We have a defined line.

[00:02:04]There's a little tiny golds along the way.

[00:02:10]And there's definitely sulfides in this.

[00:02:15]I've got magnetite and I've got some looks like maybe magnetite hematite and then there's a lot of sulfides mixed in with this this darker stuff.

[00:02:24]So I'm catching it all in the number three right now.

[00:02:38]Hey, this is only approved for children, not adults. That's why I'm on it.

[00:02:44]That's why I'm here.

[00:02:48]over the course of 20 years and had them stacked up in his garage.

[00:02:54]Oh, he he ended up going to assisted living and I had a garage full of these these cons and and there's no more after this, so um we we done what we could done and and uh Ken put us on to you guys over here and and hopefully we'll we'll get this finished up and I'll get my garage back.

[00:03:15]That's that's cool story. That's awesome. Yeah, make a little gold from it. Yeah. So sand and gravel plants Yeah. Gold in the black sands.

[00:03:23]>> Uh-huh. It's it's worth capturing the black sands.

[00:03:25]>> Yep, absolutely. There's a gentleman we know in Arizona, this is right up his alley, right? Yep.

[00:03:31]Yeah.

[00:03:33]All right, so we did a speed pan of the number one.

[00:03:37]And there is flat pieces of gold and then it looks like maybe mercury covered gold, I'm not sure. Maybe some lead, but yeah, this is not what we're used to seeing in hard rock.

[00:03:50]Um but yeah, this is this is a product for sure.

[00:03:55]It's all in the number ones. This is all good to smelt.

[00:04:01]Look what the cat dragged in.

[00:04:04]Come here, Ron. Good to see you, buddy.

[00:04:05]Good to see you. Good to see you.

[00:04:07]Man, this this system is so quiet.

[00:04:16]We got the rooster.

[00:04:18]We are loading the hopper with all of the concentrates, and we're going to start the main run right now.

[00:04:24]Good stuff here. We got these guys from Home Depot.

[00:04:29]Yeah, it's 50 bucks a week, right? That was the deal.

[00:04:33]You get $15 a week, plus you get a half a bottle of water. And you have to fill up a coffee can full of gold every day, right? That's right.

[00:04:47]And you have to count the grains of sand on there. Remember where they went so you can put them back properly to restore the habitat. That's right.

[00:04:56]All right, the mill's getting up to speed.

[00:05:00]I got Ron filming. I got Harry filming.

[00:05:05]And Chad's filling the surge hopper over there.

[00:05:09]And we got rooster.

[00:05:13]We got a whole crew.

[00:05:16]Yeah, lot Everybody's here to play today.

[00:05:20]Where's the gold?

[00:05:22]It's not here yet.

[00:05:23]It's on its way.

[00:05:39]You know what you're doing?

[00:05:40]Yeah, of course.

[00:05:47]Looks complicated.

[00:05:54]Okay, we're getting set up, ready to start running material.

[00:06:01]All right, so this is our feed rate.

[00:06:03]We'll see how this goes.

[00:06:32]Okay, it's working.

[00:07:14]All right, we're about 20 minutes into the run and we've got all gold right here.

[00:07:35]Hey Chad, can you do me a favor? Can you just go over and turn off the table for about 4 seconds and then turn it back on?

[00:07:42]I'm going to try to get a shot of this.

[00:07:45]Go ahead.

[00:07:48]Look at all that gold starting to run on the edge. Go ahead and kick it off.

[00:07:53]Nice.

[00:07:54]All right, we've been running for a while and we've been trying to figure out the slurry ratio. If we add too much um of the concentrate into the hammer mill with not enough water, it was starting to back up in the hammer mill and then if we added a little water, it would kind of balance out. And so I got that maxed out and then I went over to the feed hopper and turned it up just a little bit, ended up overfeeding the mill. So there's a fine balance running cons in a hammer mill. Um I was just telling one of the guys, the nice thing about the hammer mill running something like this, you take something that's a dry material, you put it through the hammer mill and it you can get it into a slurry wet before it hits the table. So you're not spooning dry material right onto the table and potentially losing any floating gold. So this is actually working pretty well. I'd like to run faster, but the this material is so heavy, um it takes a while to work through the system. You want to show you where we're at.

[00:08:46]So this is about the right speed for everything. I have this knife gate cracked open just perfect.

[00:08:52]And we've got a mountain of cons to run.

[00:08:54]So we probably only run about a about a a tenth tenth of this stuff.

[00:08:58]Um but yeah, you just got to go slow.

[00:09:01]This isn't going to be some two-hour thing. It's going to take a while.

[00:09:10]All right, so the gold is starting to concentrate now that we've running for a while. The gold builds up and then it just kind of pops right out here and it works its way down um through all these little specks all over the place, that's all gold.

[00:09:30]So this is a really really good concentrate.

[00:09:33]Classic concentrate.

[00:09:35]So we're just running ourselves right down into the number one.

[00:09:51]This is the top secret car right here.

[00:09:54]It makes it all happen.

[00:10:09]So, we're just looking in the number ones here at all the the heavies that are starting to build up before they fall into the cup.

[00:10:16]There's a lot of metals in there.

[00:10:19]Just hit it real quick.

[00:10:24]All right, go ahead.

[00:10:27]Well, these are the number threes that we're getting. Uh it's a lot, but that's cuz it's a concentrate.

[00:10:36]Slow and steady.

[00:10:42]I don't know, Ron. How long? Uh another minute or so.

[00:10:49]It's not heavy enough. Oh. Oh, it fell.

[00:10:55]So, let's see.

[00:11:00]Well, this is incredibly slow.

[00:11:08]We got top secret stuff here in these buckets. Check it out.

[00:11:19]I'm going to double these up cuz we're going to store them and wait for the assays to see if it's worth processing them any further.

[00:11:27]All righty, that's all I got for now.

[00:11:29]Number three.

[00:11:31]You just set these up like a rack?

[00:11:34]Like a rack?

[00:11:36]How do you mean?

[00:11:37]Like when you rack the balls. Oh, yeah.

[00:11:39]Yeah.

[00:11:44]Lots of number threes.

[00:11:47]So, we're catching it all.

[00:11:50]Get a spatula. Get it all out. You want a spatula? It's like cookie dough. Don't eat that.

[00:11:58]Don't lick the walls. Don't lick the walls.

[00:12:04]Update.

[00:12:06]We're still still doing the same thing.

[00:12:10]Ultra fine goldies.

[00:12:13]Some lead, but mostly gold.

[00:12:16]Right there.

[00:12:17]You got two big pieces running, and they're running fast.

[00:12:30]You got it.

[00:12:32]You need a sand screw.

[00:12:35]We got to put a cage over it.

[00:12:37]What are you doing here?

[00:12:40]Are you looking for flies?

[00:12:43]Yep. Come on.

[00:12:45]Come on.

[00:12:47]I know. You're more free to me, huh?

[00:12:51]What are you doing?

[00:12:54]Yeah. You're adventurous, little Lizzie.

[00:12:57]I don't know if I mentioned this, but these gentlemen said they ran all of these concentrates through the gold cube. And the gold cube did a very excellent job of recovering all the gold that they had sent to the refiner. But there's a lot of small fine pieces, and this is like the percentage that always gets through sluices and and cubes and stuff like that. So, I'm very impressed with the table catching this stuff. Uh a lot of ultra fine gold, a lot of small stuff.

[00:13:22]Um but yeah, this is this is pretty successful. There's almost a line of gold on the table, but it it's just coming in little specks.

[00:13:30]But, I'm curious to see what these guys get at the refiner. But, so far this has definitely been worth their effort and our effort.

[00:13:39]Yeah.

[00:13:43]We don't like bearings. Get out of there.

[00:13:51]Oh, this is You're I'm filming you right now. Oh, you're posing. Yeah, that's not a picture. I'm filming. Uh hey, this is the best part of my day. Yes.

[00:14:01]You have something in your left hand.

[00:14:03]Here, coffee.

[00:14:05]That's for you. That's for me. Coffee.

[00:14:07]All right. Ruler of Hawaii. I think I think you can probably guess who this is.

[00:14:21]We are at the end of the fines.

[00:14:25]They have a bunch of bucket of coarse stuff they want us to run.

[00:14:28]Um so, we'll get this out of the hopper and then uh see if they want to go keep going with their coarse stuff next.

[00:14:36]I'll probably hand feed the coarse stuff onto the conveyor because this knife gate does not like inconsistent sizes of things.

[00:14:45]So.

[00:14:47]Yeah.

[00:14:50]Let's see what happens.

[00:14:52]What's that run? We'll take it any way we can get it. Yeah, that's right.

[00:14:55]>> Enjoy your fresh gold out of the gate.

[00:14:57]Yeah, there you go.

[00:15:01]Oh, you're running it backwards. Oopsie.

[00:15:07]Why are you flushing all the gold into the trash can? What?

[00:15:12]So, this is the coarse stuff.

[00:15:15]Uh this would be the oversize classification.

[00:15:18]I don't know if there's going to be any gold in this. They think there is, so I'll run three buckets and see what it looks like on the table and then they can decide if we proceed with this stuff.

[00:15:29]All right, we're just ending our uh This is our third bucket here for the test and they're getting coarse coarser pieces of gold, which isn't a surprise.

[00:15:38]But I'm going to show you what we're getting on the table after this bucket.

[00:15:42]But yeah, running placer concentrates um whatever gravity separation they were using at this sand and gravel plant back in the day was probably a sluice.

[00:15:51]Cuz this stuff is pretty coarse.

[00:15:53]This is the oversize of what we ran earlier.

[00:15:59]So, I'm interested to kind of see what what happens with this.

[00:16:04]Placer cons.

[00:16:07]Well, at the uh sacrifice of efficiency here we're getting some coarser pieces of gold on the table now which means there's going to be a lot of roundies coming out of the mill here pretty soon.

[00:16:19]So, yeah, the placer gold's got some There's a piece of copper wire in there.

[00:16:24]Oh, your smelter's going to love you.

[00:16:27]This might be a That might be gold wire.

[00:16:28]I don't know. That's brass.

[00:16:33]Oh, man.

[00:16:35]That's a lot of jewelry to be in a river or wherever that came from.

[00:16:39]That's a lot of That's the jewelry that went flat.

[00:16:42]I can recognize that from a mile away.

[00:16:46]I can't get it.

[00:16:48]I'll try to sluice through it easy.

[00:16:50]I'm getting it out of your finger now.

[00:16:53]I'm not skilled. Yeah.

[00:16:55]Anyways, you get the idea. I'm going to go finish off this third bucket and then All right, so you can see here the sulfide line is a lot different than when we were running the fine stuff.

[00:17:07]So, this is all going into the number one and the number two.

[00:17:11]So, um yeah, that's interesting.

[00:17:16]A little bit of red color it, a little red hue.

[00:17:19]Coarse pieces of gold running through it.

[00:17:22]And I don't some of those maybe have been broken free from the the coarser rock.

[00:17:27]There's some pieces of jewelry that made it in there somehow.

[00:17:31]Classical.

[00:17:33]What's wild is the amount of lead shot that's in this oversized stuff. And there's like pieces of jewelry and I don't even know what any of this stuff is.

[00:17:42]That's crazy. Melt it all down. Melt it all down.

[00:17:47]That's wild.

[00:17:50]If you have plastic cons you want to get rid of, I'll take them.

[00:18:01]So we killed the heart of our system. We killed our water pump. So in uh in proper fashion we were expecting this. So I have a spare one. So I'll just uh reattach the fittings to this guy and then we'll just start running again.

[00:18:20]This is Harry doing mechanic work.

[00:18:22]I don't even know.

[00:18:23]When you're a miner you have to know all the trades. You have to be an electrician, a plumber, a roofer, a welder.

[00:18:32]Everything.

[00:18:33]Yeah, you need you need to be an expert in patience. What's that? I don't know.

[00:18:37]I don't have >> to hurry up and get some.

[00:18:44]So this is a bad pump and this is a good pump. You know how you can tell? This one has a nicer paint job.

[00:18:50]All right, we have the new pump installed. So I'm not going to get the water to flow through it.

[00:18:57]Here we go. Water's coming out.

[00:19:00]It's primed.

[00:19:02]So now we can start running again.

[00:19:06]Here we go.

[00:19:14]Sounds better already.

[00:19:17]Let's go see what the water flow looks like inside.

[00:19:24]Uh, where's the water flow?

[00:19:26]I can't find it.

[00:19:29]There it goes.

[00:19:31]All right, now you switch the cable again.

[00:19:34]Yeah. I'm going to flip the cable on.

[00:19:36]Yeah, that's right.

[00:19:38]Only if you want to.

[00:19:40]Okay.

[00:19:42]All right, we got the water back on. Now we got to get the This is a new pump, so now I got to rebalance the water here.

[00:19:54]Get rid of these dead zones here.

[00:19:57]You can hear it winding up.

[00:20:01]It sounded like a roller coaster starting up. It's all the hammers, and then once you get the centrifugal force, then they they they they start to they lift up.

[00:20:10]Yeah.

[00:20:16]Put your ear up against that.

[00:20:21]I was just telling the guys, I I've never seen anybody run placer concentrates through a hammer mill. I mean, maybe somebody out there has has done it or is doing it, but I haven't seen it. Uh, a lot of this is just gravel, but then you get these little pieces of iron chunks, and I've dredged in the river before, and we found whole hard packs of this iron oxidized stuff in the bottom of the on the bedrock. And so, I'm starting to wonder if the assays they were getting wasn't just from you know, maybe some free mill gold that was in the placer. I'm starting to think that maybe it might have been in some of this conglomerate, this iron conglomerate stuff. I I don't know what you call it. I'm I'm not really a placer guy, but there's a lot of it in here, so I'm wondering if that's where their grade is coming from, cuz this has been assayed, and it was it was pretty rich for what it is.

[00:21:10]So, yeah, we're running it. We're getting a lot of bird shot, but I think the gold's coming out of this these iron things.

[00:21:18]Yeah, we'll see.

[00:21:21]This is not the ideal way to do this, but what happens is is I'll run about half a bucket and have to stop for the lead to get through the screen before I can keep going. So, I can't just constantly feed this mill.

[00:21:34]So, I'll just do little batches.

[00:21:36]And then I'll go over and get all the concentrates and swap out the ones and twos.

[00:21:41]A lot of bird shot in this. Like, I've never seen this much bird shot.

[00:21:45]Yeah, it's like somebody just poured pounds of it in there. Yeah, there's definitely pounds of lead in this.

[00:21:53]Well, at 87 cents a pound, you'll get some back anyway.

[00:22:03]Looks like fun.

[00:22:05]It's like Tom Sawyer's fence.

[00:22:07]Yeah, I think we did about 2,500 lbs by weight today when everything said and done. Is that the last bucket?

[00:22:16]We have five more.

[00:22:18]Oh, my.

[00:22:21]The fun's over.

[00:22:24]All right, we are down to the last two buckets, Ron.

[00:22:28]Yay. Are you are you sad that we're going to be out of buckets to run? No.

[00:22:32]No.

[00:22:35]There's a lot of lead in here. You can't see it like this, but it's there. It's Well, whatever wherever it was concentrated, they did a good job concentrating. Yeah, all That's all heavy. I'm excited to run those crucibles after this.

[00:22:47]>> Yeah. Yeah, bonus material. After we run this, we have a couple crucibles uh a whole bucket full of crucibles we're going to run that's got gold and silver and stuff, so Um Yeah, we're going to run that next.

[00:23:03]That's all bird shot.

[00:23:06]Bird shot.

[00:23:10]This must be some kind of a record, but the amount of bird shot on the table is just That's just three riffles full, so competing competing for the space of of the gold.

[00:23:24]Working their way into that one and then coming on out.

[00:23:28]Yeah, that's This is wild. Not even need ball milled.

[00:23:33]Yeah.

[00:23:34]If you ball milled this, it'd be even worse. It's going to stay all flat now.

[00:23:37]It'd be flat.

[00:23:40]That's That's just wild.

[00:23:43]Bird shot hell.

[00:23:45]You got all kinds of bird shot on here.

[00:23:49]Crazy.

[00:23:55]It looks like the Cabazon dinosaur.

[00:24:01]I'm having too much fun with this.

[00:24:03]Brass tacks.

[00:24:06]That's my official guess. That's where the saying probably comes from.

[00:24:10]You're down to the brass tacks.

[00:24:12]>> Yeah, that's my official uh Sounds good.

[00:24:16]Sounds Sounds like >> it was gold jewelry, but I don't think it is. We thought it was at first. Yeah, maybe someone I think gold would have mashed up more. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:35]You touched it.

[00:24:37]That's the gold. I was waiting for someone to do that. Yeah, that's where I hit the gold dust.

[00:24:46]Wasn't that ever fun? Gold dust up on top of there all day.

[00:24:50]That's where I've been hiding the nuggets. That That dust has been there since the first day that light went in.

[00:24:55]Never been cleaned.

[00:24:57]It's been cleaned now in my head. Yeah, in your face? Yeah.

[00:25:02]I inhaled a lot so you wouldn't have to breathe it. Thank you, Ron.

[00:25:12]Yeah, that's lead.

[00:25:15]Lots of lead.

[00:25:17]And brass tacks. I think there was more gold in the the fines than the the coarse. I uh I have to agree.

[00:25:26]I didn't see I didn't see really anything in this one.

[00:25:30]You can save all the other brass.

[00:25:32]>> believe you made us run all 13 buckets.

[00:25:35]What?

[00:25:39]Such a slave driver.

[00:25:43]Okay, we have finished. It's been a long day.

[00:25:46]Look at how many buckets we have.

[00:25:49]These are all the number threes of the cons.

[00:25:53]So, this is the concentrates that we're left with.

[00:25:57]That was somewhere north of 2,000 lb.

[00:26:01]So, we're left with a half a bucket plus another I'd say a fifth of the number twos. And then um just a probably about one full um one and a half quart or two and a half quart. So, I didn't fill them up all the way. But yeah, this is all the concentrates. We started off with the fine stuff, ended up with some pretty decent cons with a lot of showing of gold. But then, once we started running the coarse stuff, we started getting all this bizarre metals and and and stuff.

[00:26:33]So, I'm curious to see what you get from the refiner. So, uh these are your cons. Um I hope you're happy with with the results from turning many, many buckets into you're taking home essentially one bucket if you put it all in one spot, so >> That definitely pleased. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:56]Um we did our cleanup. The table has been washed and uh scrubbed down.

[00:27:02]We cleaned out the little bin in here cuz there's some colloidal magnetite that went through.

[00:27:08]And so now the system's been cleaned.

[00:27:12]That's it for part three for a crush it and find out running placer concentrates and classified oversized placer concentrates on the Mount Baker Mining and Metals hammer mill and the 1 ton an hour shaker table.

[00:27:27]So, we can >> Yes, we're tired. Chad had to leave and >> Hollywood had to Mr. Hollywood had to leave. So now we're down with uh Ron, Rooster, and uh good good Roger. Yeah, good Roger.

[00:27:39]>> bad Roger sees this.

[00:27:41]>> Yeah. And so uh Mrs. Harry has been patiently waiting and I told her this was going to take a half day. Well, it is not been a half day, so >> It is now quarter to 7:00 p.m.

[00:27:51]>> Yeah, it's been over 12 hours. So, I'm going to go talk to Mrs. Harry and then we're going to run some crucible.

[00:27:58]>> hours is a half a day on a 24-hour clock.

[00:28:04]No comment. All right.

[00:28:06]So, we're doing something we've never done before.

[00:28:09]We have these crucibles that were used for jewelry making and you can see little beads of gold in there.

[00:28:15]So, Rooster is smashing them small enough in order to get it fit in the crusher. That one will go.

[00:28:23]All that stuff. That's full of it. Full of gold.

[00:28:28]I think that's already small enough.

[00:28:42]Nice.

[00:28:46]Oh yeah, you can see the gold in it.

[00:28:49]Over here.

[00:28:52]Tiny bits and it's very tiny still.

[00:28:54]>> It's everywhere. See the whole thing.

[00:28:56]Hopefully we can liberate it in the mill.

[00:28:59]Right?

[00:29:00]Yeah, it's all through there.

[00:29:02]Yeah.

[00:29:04]Crucibles are ready for crushing.

[00:29:20]Crucible crucibles.

[00:29:35]Takes 2 minutes to start up.

[00:30:04]Hey there, that's gold. That's gold.

[00:30:07]Yep.

[00:30:08]A little round BBs and flatten them out.

[00:30:10]Uh-huh.

[00:30:25]It's all graphite crucible. Refractory material here. Is it refractory? Yeah.

[00:30:32]Leftover last shot.

[00:30:36]You just got to shovel it, baby.

[00:30:48]>> It's coming high.

[00:30:51]There's a piece of gold.

[00:31:03]Where did that jump come from?

[00:31:05]Wow.

[00:31:07]Oh.

[00:31:08]Here's the shotgun belt.

[00:31:10]Where did the other shotgun belt come from? Right there.

[00:31:14]That's what the coarse normally looks like. So, when you run it over, the whole table will look like that.

[00:31:23]Every run is a different pattern on the table. Yeah.

[00:31:27]See that big old nugget right there?

[00:31:30]That is smashed in there. All right.

[00:31:32]Like a bam. Yeah.

[00:31:34]And I said, "That never got a camera case either. The GoPro's can't see that well." Never mind.

[00:31:39]>> No, it's just for that. I got to think that girl is making eyes at you.

[00:31:42]Hey.

[00:31:43]Just a couple more hours, okay? Just Just one more hour, honey. I swear.

[00:31:48]Believe me, I want to be done right now.

[00:31:49]You want I wanted it to be done hours ago.

[00:31:51]>> it to be done at noon. I was like, "Yeah, we're going to leave at like 1:00, babe." You guys going to bring me, you know, some tongs? Safe tongs.

[00:31:58]Probably. Yeah, I told them a couple hours. A couple hours?

[00:32:01]And then we'll run your other stuff.

[00:32:05]There's bad Roger.

[00:32:43]>> Oh.