Getting Gold from Hard Rock

本站添加: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Welcome back to the glacial gold hunter.

[00:00:02]Today we got another hard rock load gold deposit to check out. Now this is actual gold ore from a Montana gold mine. It was given to me by our friend Carl Madley and it comes from Dave Vanderwal's gold mine. Some of you have probably met them at the flower gold wizard outings. So I've got a number of different samples here. Some very coarse samples, some pulverized samples kind of ready to go and a big chunk of this ore.

[00:00:28]Now, if you look at this, it doesn't look like much. Looks like something you'd probably just walk right over, but there's gold in it. I took this bigger piece and cut a chunk off so we can see what it looks like on the inside. We'll wet it down so it shows a little better.

[00:00:41]But you can see it's all brown and dirty, but there is quartz mixed up in there. And the gold in this is very fine. I know that. So, I'm probably not going to be able to see any with my eye.

[00:00:52]And that's why we got to crush it up.

[00:00:54]Now, it's very dark, kind of rusty colored. And that kind of gives me an indication that there's some sulfides that came along with it. And we've talked about that before. Sulfides help the gold go into solution. You can see these coarse chunks there and that deep rusty red. So I'm guessing right there in those nodules, there were some sulfides that weathered away. But as those sulfides weather away, they can leave behind the gold. Now, this sample was pretty interesting to me because if you look on the outside edge, you can see it's very white. And when I feel it, it's a very soapy feeling. Geology is a very tactile science. So being able to feel things is an important indicator for how to identify rocks. And if I take my fingernail and scratch it, you can see I can scratch it with my fingernail. So it's a very soft mineral.

[00:01:45]That tells me that maybe that's talc.

[00:01:49]Now, if it is talc, that makes sense because talc forms in hydrothermal deposits, metamorphic events. So, I'd be willing to guess that's what that is.

[00:01:57]And on the bottom side of this piece, you can see it's kind of all green. You can almost kind of see some of the slickening line. So, I'm guessing that this is a part of the hanging wall or the foot wall. So, this vein would have would have formed in a fault deposit.

[00:02:11]You know, that's kind of the conduit for the fluids to flow through. And I have no idea the grade of this ore. I just know there's gold in it. And the only way to get the gold out is to crush it up into a fine fine powder. Now, this bag here, it's like the consistency of powdered sugar. It's so super super fine. This one's crushed up, but not quite as fine. And then we got our coarse samples. Now, for the coarse samples, since I still have Jason's mighty mill here, I'm going to run them through that and get those into a fine powder. I got to give this back tomorrow, but it should handle these.

[00:02:45]All right. This bigger piece has some interesting features, too, because when you look at it, you can see there's all these little pockets. It's almost like this spongy looking rock. As the fluids are flowing through that, they can deposit minerals and they can alter minerals and take minerals away. So, I'm guessing that's kind of what's happened here. uh the minerals going through not only deposited some min mineralization some quartz and gold or whatnot but after that was laid down fluids came through and started taking away some of the minerals exactly the story there I don't really know but I know it's pretty cool and I don't want silicosis so I'll put my respirator on.

[00:03:55]So, it kind of started to sound different and I opened this little door and looked inside and those little chain clevices in there broke. So, I'm going to have to get some new ones for Mr. Wizard.

[00:04:11]Look at that.

[00:04:14]Every single one of them broke.

[00:04:19]Look at that. All three of them worn down till they broke in half. If only there was a place I could go to get a little chain clevis like this.

[00:04:45]I'll show you the gem of the Midwest.

[00:04:48]Top the tater. Get plain salted riffled chips.

[00:04:53]Scoop up the dip.

[00:04:57]>> The prophecy is true.

[00:05:01]>> They call it Minnesota crack. Plus, when you're done, you get a new scooper. so that Mighty Mill handles those smaller pieces in no time. But these are a little too big to fit in there. So, I'm going to crush those up in my stamp mill.

[00:05:28]So, that crushes down into gravel size really easily. Now, this big piece here I still want to crush, but that one's not going to be so easy. Good thing I got my steel toes on.

[00:05:44]Oh, that's really rusty.

[00:05:47]That's good stuff.

[00:05:56]You see that spark?

[00:06:00]Some parts are really soft and some are pretty dang hard.

[00:06:07]It's definitely not good for your concrete floor, but they should all fit in there.

[00:06:15]Wow, look at that zone right there. It's like black and drewy.

[00:06:21]And at this point, my microphone died, but I kept on grinding up the rocks until that was done. Then I yammered on something about putting it away for a later date, but the later date is here.

[00:06:32]So, let's clean it up. Now, this is everything I crushed up with the Mighty Mill, but I want to show you what Dave actually crushes up at his mine. This is what he actually processes, and it looks quite a bit different than what I have.

[00:06:47]This stuff is a consistency of powdered sugar. It is so fine. and talking to him, he will get things down to about 300 mesh before he starts looking for the gold. I know the gold in this ore is so incredibly fine, it's going to be a trick to get it out, but we're going to do our best. It reminds me of moon dust, like in Apollo 13 when Tom Hanks climbs down and he's running his fingers through the moon soil. That was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid.

[00:07:19]Still is. Now, the mighty mill gets things down pretty good, but there's still chunks and stuff, and I know I need to get this material as fine as I can and as uniform as I can. I don't have a 300 mesh, but I do have a pretty fine kitchen strainer. That's the best I can do. So, I'm going to classify it all just so we're giving ourselves the best opportunity to collect this super fine gold.

[00:07:53]That leaves behind a little bit more than I was hoping. That might be a job for my ball mill. We'll check what we s first, though. That's a lot more bigger pieces than I thought there would be.

[00:08:03]I'd say about half of that gallon bucket at least was was these bigger pieces.

[00:08:09]Getting rock to really fine powder is not easy. But everything is through and I have probably a half a pan. But I got that classified. That's pretty fine. Not as fine as Dave's powdered sugar there, but still pretty fine. So, I'm going to go with that and see what we can get out of that. Now, I think Dave uses a shaker table. And I I know Carl Matley, who gave this, he was going to try to extract the gold with a shaker table. I don't have that, but I do have the Flower Gold Wizard cleanup slle. This is made for the super fine gold, but I don't know if it's made for this fine of gold, but I'm gonna give it a try. Okay, so it's all set up and I know the water's going to turn really red, so we probably won't be able to see much. And we'll start scooping.

[00:08:59]I don't know, Dave. Is this going to work?

[00:09:02]All we can do is try, right? I do have my catch pan to catch all the material in case we need to do this again.

[00:09:11]This is definitely acting different than other material. I think when you have a beach material or a river material, the sand grains are much more rounded, so they move around a lot easier. It looks to me like everything's kind of getting locked into these ripples. Being that I crushed it up the way I did, it's just so angular. It's going to lock together.

[00:09:32]So to get it to dance, I feel like I have to have a a higher flow.

[00:09:37]But with a higher flow, I'm worried I'm just going to wash that fine gold out. I can see why a shaker table would be beneficial.

[00:09:54]The water is red. I can't see a thing.

[00:09:58]All of that material is run through. I don't see any gold, but the material in the riffles does look dark. It does look like black sand, so there might be some heavy iron oxide material in there. I don't know. No visible gold, though. Kind of skeptical that this worked. I feel like the peripherals just weren't exchanging the way they needed to be or was just going too fast for this fine gold. We might have to reprocess this, but I'm going to pan what we have out in here and we'll just see. So, I've let this settle a bit, and to be honest, I think there's probably a fair amount that went through this. So, I can see pieces of metal in there. And that's from the mighty mill when I crushed it up. I'll draw them away with a magnet.

[00:10:45]See them all there? Look at all that.

[00:10:51]You can see the material left in there is really red. And I'm going to guess that those are oxidized sulfides.

[00:11:01]But you can see on the top there, that is your gold. That little line, it is so fine.

[00:11:13]Tapping it up in the corner there.

[00:11:16]It's clearly gold, but my goodness, those are tiny pieces.

[00:11:22]We did get some of it, and that is super cool. That's amazing. But I think there's probably still some that went over. So, I'm going to have to keep this and figure out some other way to extract that. This is probably a case where people would use mercury and really get that out. But mercury is so toxic. I don't want to touch it. There are ways to get gold out with gravity separation that are just as good as mercury.

[00:11:49]You just have to know the trick on how to do it. But what I want to do now is I want to take this ultra fine powdered sugar material that Dave processed himself and I'm going to just pan that down and see what I can get from that.

[00:12:04]So that ultra fine stuff is pre-oaked. I put that in there and I'm going to just do half at a time.

[00:12:13]It's just like clay. It's so fine.

[00:12:16]There's some There's some bigger parts down in there, too, but Good grief. It's fine material.

[00:12:32]This looks like the perfect time to use these fine riffles. That's just like that little slle box, but with my hand action, I can kind of get that shaker table action a little bit.

[00:12:52]So, panning that down, I think I recovered about the same amount as I did with the whole other sample. It just blows my mind how fine this is. But you can still separate it. That's pretty cool. You know, you look at a rock like this, you'd never guess that there's actually something valuable. And if you know the right tricks, you can actually turn this into something profitable.

[00:13:12]That's super cool to see. You know, I don't get a chance to see actual gold ore very often. So, every time I get a chance to see it, I think it's really cool. There's lots of different types of gold complex. So, to have a sample, that's really cool. Maybe someday I'll go visit Dave at his mine. For now, I still got a lot of material here that I think has gold. So, I think it's an excellent candidate to do some future experimenting when I get into smelting, which I plan to very soon. smelt it down, cupel it, do that type of stuff.

[00:13:45]But that'll be for a future project. For now, thank you guys for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments.

[00:13:51]Come on back for the next one. Bye-bye.