1990 Test Run, Submersible dredge gold recovery.
Nov 26, 2008 23:29:18 GMT 12
Post by Dredger89 on Nov 26, 2008 23:29:18 GMT 12
In 1990 me and a friend located a payable deposit of fine gold in a local creek. We had between us two dredges, a 3 inch Keene surface dredge 1979 model, plus a 5 inch Eldorado submersible dredge. I initially located the gold by just panning, it was real fine gold, every pan showed 30-40 fine colors at least. The wash was about 2 feet deep sitting on a decomposed pipe clay bottom. My friend was new to dredging, he used the 3 for one day during the week he did not produce a great deal of gold, too many blockages! He asked if i had any ideas. I thought why not use the 5 inch?, what about the fine gold loss he asked? Not an issue, we shall attach a screen to the dredge outlet, fitted with a tiny sump, connect the 3 inch hose to this.
We took this set up to the creek, it worked real well, the little keene 3 was running on auto processing all those sand tailings, we had 5 inch production up front. Due to the stream bed composition we did not have to move many rocks by hand. We worked the creek from bank to bank and down to the clay progressing upstream.
At the end of the day we wanted to see how we had done, we kept the concentrates in separate buckets. There was a large volume of black sand. The gold split was very close to 50/50 to each dredge? We ended up working this creek for 6 weekends both days. It produced 3/4 of an ounce per day total production.
We did do a test run on our dredge tailings, just in case some of the stream wash was spilling out of our screen system. Not much recovered there! A few weeks later we took that complete system to another location. The gold was slightly bigger, more like the alluvial gold in most rivers, oddly enough there was very little gold in the surface dredge?
I wish i had taken photos of the set up, i am not aware of anyone else doing this kind of test.
We took this set up to the creek, it worked real well, the little keene 3 was running on auto processing all those sand tailings, we had 5 inch production up front. Due to the stream bed composition we did not have to move many rocks by hand. We worked the creek from bank to bank and down to the clay progressing upstream.
At the end of the day we wanted to see how we had done, we kept the concentrates in separate buckets. There was a large volume of black sand. The gold split was very close to 50/50 to each dredge? We ended up working this creek for 6 weekends both days. It produced 3/4 of an ounce per day total production.
We did do a test run on our dredge tailings, just in case some of the stream wash was spilling out of our screen system. Not much recovered there! A few weeks later we took that complete system to another location. The gold was slightly bigger, more like the alluvial gold in most rivers, oddly enough there was very little gold in the surface dredge?
I wish i had taken photos of the set up, i am not aware of anyone else doing this kind of test.
