Crushing gold ore to make gold and then cash in - pour big gold from metal detecting rich gold ore

hey I'm Chris Ralph the professional prospector and this is a video I've been planning to do with you guys for a long time we're gonna go through the entire process of how to take raw rocks full of gold like this one and we're gonna take it all the way from crushing it and separating it out from the quartz and then melting it down and the final product is gonna be a button that you could ship to a refiner and get paid for so we're going all the way from rocks to cash and I don't know that I'll do the final step of sending my piece in for for refinement and payment but it'll be ready to ship and and it'll show it'll have all the steps of the way that you would need to do to turn gold-bearing rocks into hard money so stick around with me because I've got a jar full of rocks here that I all these rocks cluding this one are pieces that I detected with my member Tector last year and they all have gold in them some have quite a bit of visible gold some only have a little tiny bit of visible gold but sound off pretty good and if the metal detector says that there's a good gold inside the rock and maybe a little tiny bit is showing you know the metal detector is gonna be right it knows what it's talking about so I got that jar and then I got this this is a bag with about 20 pounds of rocks in it and this was also found with the metal detector the difference being that that bag full rock see with the other ones I would go through and separate out the individual piece that sounded off with the metal detector and with that I was the other bag I was out of mine and I was actually at the entrance of the mine and got a target in the vein that sounded off real good and so I just took everything you know in that area until the target was gone and didn't bother to try and find one or two or three cases that had the signal in it so we're going to crush down the whole thing we're gonna go through all the steps of purifying it and separating out the goal then we're gonna melt it with flux and we're gonna produce a button and you know be ready to put in a box and ship off to a refiner all the steps you need to know to go from rocks to cash on this video so stand by we're gonna get started right now okay so the first step in going from rocks to gold is you got to crush the rocks to get the gold out and I have here a relatively small amount a small amount of rocks this is really only a little over a pound of rock I waited up and yet I expect this will probably have close to a quarter ounce of gold in it these are all pieces of gold that are pieces of rock that I found with the metal detector that sounded off because they had gold in them some of them have quite a bit of visible gold in the pieces I've got some pictures you can see this is some pretty nice gold I got quite a bit of nice yellow right in among the quartz here and this is the kind of stuff we're gonna be crushing down and making a nice button out of and some of them have you know not a lot visible but still make the detector sound off and that really is one of the the big secret of getting gold out of rocks you got to start out with rocks that have good gold in them to begin with if your rocks don't have anything but the tiniest trace of gold in them then tiniest traces all you can get out right even if you got every little bit of it and the truth is usually you miss some so I'm gonna get started with crushing this is my jaw crusher here I actually have a motor for this thing and I'm going to be installing that soon and I'll show you the motor when I get it installed but basically the rock will go in here there's a set of Jaws that one jaw comes like this kind of rotates on a tickle type of motion and as it comes together it crushes the rock and as it pulls up out it allows the rock to go back down and then it crushes again and the material works its way through it goes into this bucket I'll actually put a little protector in this space here just to keep little chips from flying out because rock that's got a quarter ounce of gold and a pound of it that's rock you don't want to be losing chips so I'm gonna have a protector here and let me show you how this is done okay so here's what we're going to get started with I have chunk of quartz here from a mined out that I detected with a metal detector and the metal detector says there's non-ferrous gold on the inside non-ferrous means it's not steel it's not iron and we're gonna put this in the jaw I put this that's also the whole chips in and then this is hand operated I have a motor for this and I haven't installed it yet in one of my future videos I'll show you the this jaw crusher operating with the motor but for now we're just going to crush my hand and that's all it takes to crush that rock I will show you the crushed rock when we get done with this now there's other ways of crushing rock there's mortar and pestle where you basically have a heavy steel container and you pound on it sometimes called the Dali pot especially in Australia same concept basically you're pounding to crush the rock down it's a lot of work crushing a pound of rock in a Dali pot would be an awful lot of work it's a lot easier going through this jaw crusher now the jaw crusher is only the first step we also have a second crusher a chainmail crusher which I will show you in a minute but let me crush this rock down and then I will show you in what the crushed rock looks like here's what that rock looks like after the first step of crushing I crushed it real fine with that jaw crusher there's there's quite a bit of gold in there and you're gonna see me take it all the way down to the final step a porn a button with it and like I say yeah I think I'm gonna get em at or maybe even a little better than a quarter of an ounce in just about a pound of rock it just goes to show you if you got the right rock you can do real well crushing gold or crushing quartz rock and extracting the gold from it now at the beginning of this video I mentioned that I have another lot of rock this is Ron Oh 15 18 20 pounds at the most and I'm gonna go through crushes to this also was detected with the metal detector but I didn't pick out just a piece or two that had the gold in it I just took out the whole section of the vein so I'm gonna go through this a little more roughly and crush this down and we're gonna process it too but I'm keeping this separate and at the end I'll show you the difference between a whole bunch of detected little gold pieces and specimens and then just one where I cleaned out the whole vein that's this one all right let's get to crushing this [Applause] this'll take a while but it's a whole lot faster than the dolly pot especially if you're trying to crush 15 or 20 pounds so I will make it stand here with me the whole time let's fast forward to when I'm done with this set of crushing alright well I now have both fractions with the initial course crush here you can see in the bucket here everything is then broken down the next step is going to be I'm going to take the high-grade stuff the smaller one-pound sample that I had and we're gonna screen that will screen it real good and pick out the pieces of gold that are in there because there's no need to run those through the next step of crushing this stuff I expect the goal to be finer in general and we will probably go ahead and take this directly to the next step of crushing so today I'm going to screen my or and you might ask well why bother was screening this high-grade stuff why don't you just dump it all in the chainmail like I'm going to do with the other big bag full of or rock well there's a reason why I'm doing it and it's because gold is soft and malleable and what I have is a chainmail or a flail mill sometimes they're called it spins it around in a real high speed in there and the spinning chain breaks the rock right well gold is soft and malleable and it has a tendency to just smear the gold around on the inside of my chainmail and I want my gold in the finished button I don't want it smeared around on the inside of my crusher doesn't make any sense so what I'm going to do is gonna take this material and I'm screening into three actions I've got quarter inch and twelfth of an inch and then whatever passes through that and I'm gonna pick out of each fraction be visible this book you know kind of like visible pieces of gold like that then I get out of the the screening and those will go in a separate thing and I will go ahead and just take those directly to the melt that way I don't spread the gold around on one side of my crusher so simple process the screen and a lot of what comes out of this coarse fraction is gold those are a couple pieces basically nuggets from the okay well I'm gonna look through this screen and separate them out and I'll bring you back in and show you what I get at the end okay so I'm going to go ahead and pan out the smaller fractions the larger stuff I just them going to I pick through there and I'll just send that direct to the crusher to the next crusher but the smaller fractions I'll pan out to get whatever coarser gold I can get out of it I just wanted to show you I've already got quite a bit of gold right here here I'll hold it up you can see it a little better there you can see it a little better and it's it's gonna be a nice a nice pour when I'm done and I'll get some more out of this but first I want to pan and get what I can panting I'll show you when I'm done with this panning stage what I got and then we'll do the final last little bit by crushing this again so stay tuned we're gonna be right back okay well we've got all that panning done and hey we did pretty good want to show you here we got a pretty good amount of gold in there I'm guessing that we're already well over a quarter of an ounce and I still have to take this stuff that I processed we'll take this and I'll let it dry out and then I'll crush it all the way down but I'll show you when we get to the next step to the other crusher and show you how I do that but we're gonna get some good gold out of this too so this is gonna end up being a real good run-up of getting some nice gold out of that quartz rock just goes to show you that if you get into a good mine into the dumps and you metal detect you can get some really nice gold and you're gonna see that on this video so hang on let's go inside and weigh what we got as far as coarse gold and then I will let this dry over a couple days and then bring you back and we'll go through the crushing phase the second crushing phase to get this all crushed down and then also that larger lot from the bag that I got from the other mind where I didn't pick out the individual pieces that had some gold but let's continue on with ours and we'll next take a look at where we're at as far as gold so far okay so this is the gold we have so far a little over 10.5 grams and of course there is a little bit of quartz mixed in but we're doing really well this is great that's is actually better than I expected like I say I was calling for maybe a quarter ounce total we're gonna get some more gold out of the other fractions after we run them through the chain crusher so this is not the limit of what we're gonna get we're gonna do even better than this hey I thought I'd get in here with my crusher and show you a few things before we got started I've opened up the crusher so you can see inside and what's in there you can see hopefully you can see this is some chain that's basically there's a big bearing right here and behind is a motor and this is a kind of a cylinder shape although it's a narrow cylinder it's a shallow cylinder and there's two rows of chains that when the motors turned on spin around at a real high speed it's just regular old chain like you could get from Home Depot I mean this is the right kind of stuff and basically it flannels around on the inside of that thing and hits the pieces of rock and of course it goes so fast that the rock spins around and bounces around and then get smashed by this chain and then at the bottom here you can't really see but the bottom there's a little screen and once it gets beat up enough that it's small enough to pass through the screen it goes out through a hose here and then I actually have a dust collection system which you'll see in a few minutes when I actually run it and and the material goes out this plastic tube goes to the dust collection system and well actually it goes into a bucket to catch the material first the most of the material and then the part that isn't caught in the the bucket goes through the dust control and then out into the air so the most of the material is caught either by the regular bucket or the dust control and then actually the dust that I capture in the dust control system I mix back in all I'll pan that stuff out too and so anyway it gets it down to a real small size and I will show you that before I pan it out but this is the last the second and last crushing step before we do a final pan and then we'll dry the material mix it with some flux and we'll be back here in the work shed to do our final melt probably tomorrow because it'll take a while to get this done but we'll do our melt and and then I'll show you the final button and that will be the last stage the button will be of course ready to ship to a refiner ready to turn your gold into cash so here's my dust control system this is a cyclone type of dust collector it's actually originally designed for wood collection but this is the tube coming out of the crusher this is where the bulk of the dust and ground up or will fall is in this bucket and then hopefully you can see this other tube that comes out of the cyclone and this goes into a shopback a big shop-vac so that's how the dust collection works for my crusher okay so here's a another view of my crusher there's a lectric motor right here it's a one horsepower motor and then here's the drum that I showed you just a bit ago that has the chains that spin around on the inside and the chains actually bust up the bust up the ore bike just impact right it's that basically an impact mill and this is the feeder this red thing you put material in here it goes down this chute feeds into the back of the drum where the chains are spinning and then eventually when it's small enough it passes through the screen and goes out to the dust collection system to the the settling bucket that I just showed you so that's basically the basics of it and you got to be careful about feeding it in you can feed too much too fast and it just bogs the whole thing down and if you get it bogged down bad enough you have to stop the motor and open up the drum and clean it all out and then restart so you know and hey I've done that in the past so if you're careful you can keep it going the the chains get worn out they don't last more than you know a set of chains may do a couple hundred pounds at the most and so you got to keep care on your chains and make sure that they're they're in good shape and replace them frequently because that's what's necessary but anyway I'm going to use this I could say it's really loud and so um you know I'll get it started but then I'm going to turn this video off because one it's not really all that exciting to see me slowly feed the material in through here and to it's just loud so anyway let me get it started and I'll show you what it's like okay so you've seen it's really loud so I'm gonna run it and process this material without the camera being on and I think that you'll be happier coming in at the end you've seen how the crusher works so let's go ahead and go I'll go ahead and go through it and then I'll show you get back together with you at the end and I'll show you the material and we'll pan it out and see what we get out of this I'll also crush up the material from the bag the larger lot that was also with this but I say I'm going to keep them separate anyway we'll see how it comes up so here's a close-up of the or after it's been fully crushed you can see it's basically the size of very fine beach sand and smaller the way this poured out in the pan I didn't notice this that basically this is the coarsest material on top there's finer material that's underneath but anyway so it's this size and smaller which does a good job of liberating the gold okay we're gonna pan out our crushed rock I'm gonna show you in a picture what the crushed rock looks like you can see how fine it is and we're gonna pan it out right now it's literally just like powder and then we're gonna see how much gold is in it cuz that's what we want to find out huh so panting of course is a slow process the fact there's a lot of dust tells you I got it real fine I think we're gonna do it more than one pass okay so I'll get you back and show you what things look like when I'm done with this okay so here's a picture of all of the material after I panned it all out and you can see that there's quite a bit of gold all the gray up at the top of the the pan there is all gold with some heavies mixed in but there's a good amount there and it may look a little bit gray rather than yellow but that's because most of that material is electrum there is some yellow gold mixed in with it but there's a lot of pale colored electrum that's in there as well so that's pretty good result and I'm real happy with that I did pan out the other pan and there was a little bit in it too and I'm adding them up together and the next step is going to be to melt the entirety and produce a nice button of gold okay so we're ready now we panned everything out well actually we crushed the rock we panned it out we got our gold and we're ready to put it in a graphite crucible in my furnace here and we're going to melt it all down I'm going to mix the gold that I've got this the coarse gold and the fine gold together we're gonna mix it with some flux about equal volume and this flux is a mixture of sodium carbonate sodium borate or borax and a little bit of silica sand and there's a little tiny bit of silica sand in there too and the way anyway will equal it about equal volume of the the coarse gold and the fine gold that I've got will mix them together and then melt it out so it's kind of a funny angle I know shooting through a window because the way my work shed is set up literally if I were to shout set up the camera behind me all you'd see is my back you wouldn't be able to see any of the furnace or the melting or anything else once I get it melted I'm gonna pour everything into this little graphite cone mold and the gold and silver mostly gold will collect at the bottom there so anyway I've got it all mixed up and take care of and I'll bring you back and show you things when we're we got the the little quick melt kill on burning and operating and I'll show you all that and then of course I'll show you the poor okay I think we're up to temperature and I'm gonna heat the graphite mold and then we're gonna make the poor I may cut through a few things because heating the graphite mold isn't exactly exciting but I'll get you in for the poor that's for sure [Music] okay now for the poor [Music] [Music] it doesn't take very long and I saw the metal go out there and you went into the bottom let's see what we got in just a minute when we let it cool and then we'll flip it over and see the button okay it's had a few minutes to cool let's take our mold and turn it over and see what our button looks like Pop Tart out yeah yeah trying to turn it over I know it's hot huh looks great let me get a hammer okay I got my hammer and there's our button the gold sure you can see it I'll get you a closer up picture in a second and we'll weigh it out and see what our final tally what we actually got looks pretty impressive to me so here's our button close up you can see it's over 15 grams I calculated this out that's like 0.49 troy ounces so we came right up close to half an ounce I was just really surprised I'm happy with the total result and of course that includes both the bigger bulk sample and the high-grade detected in the small jar so we finished our project and what do we got to show for it a nice button which I just showed you weighs almost half an ounce of gold and now it's not pure and it's it's not well natural gold is never pure I figured it about 90% and I think that's a relatively good ballpark estimate and so if you figure gold at - $1,600 an ounce which is what it's been bouncing around at you know the time that I'm filming this video and you know just to ship a hair under half an ounce total weight and a 90% purity it comes out to be about $700 worth of gold which hey $700 not too bad if you know just for a couple hours worth of work now this is a gold button that's ready to ship to a refiner for cash and if you were gonna ship it you'd basically put this in a box and insure it and send it to the refiner of your choice and they'll pay you for it but I want to tell you a little bit about shipping off gold to a refiner and that is that they do charge for their services that's not free and usually it's a mostly a a lot of the charge anyway is a fixed price and so fixed price might be a couple hundred bucks so if you sent in ten thousand dollars worth of gold that $200 on ten thousand that's a pretty small percentage if you send in five hundred dollars worth of gold two hundred dollars is forty percent so it pays to save it up and that's exactly what I'm gonna do with this button I'll save it up and at a time when I'm more in need of the money or something like that I'll send it in for now it'll go on my safety deposit box so I hope you've enjoyed our series here our little set of work about how to convert rocks into gold and then a little bit discussion about how to convert the gold we got into cash and I'm gonna do a lot more this kind of stuff but I wrote a book about finding your own gold and it will teach you the skills that you need to know to find your own gold for yourself and then maybe you can spend a couple hours making 700 bucks and save that up anyway the book that I wrote is called Fistful of gold but I'm telling you a little bit more about the book right now so let me tell you a little bit more about my book it's called Fistful of gold and I wrote it because I want you to be able to go out and find for yourself this full of gold and you can see that it's an encyclopedia with all kinds of information pictures and that sort of thing it's not in color but the color would have cost me a lot more to have printed and so the book would have cost a lot more it's for sale on Amazon and you can pick it up I'll put a link in the description below I also serve as the editor for a prospecting magazine it's I see MJ's prospecting and mining journal and honestly you should check that out we've got stories and information legal stuff everything you know to increase your skills as a prospector I write articles in this every month and a lot of other very experienced prospectors contribute to the magazine as well so check magazine now also I have a website and the website is at Nevada outback Gems calm I'll put a link for it in the description below but there's gobs of information there that you will find useful in your prospecting efforts finally I want to say that I really appreciate your comments and thoughts and even positive criticism don't come on there and just toss out insults because I'll just delete your comments but if you've got helpful things to say and questions to ask do write and and put those in the comments because I answer my comments to people and you'll hear from me in you know in responding to you if so if you have enjoyed this video and you like what you see and you're interested in finding out more well then sign up subscribe and hit the the notification bell so they'll let you know when I post new videos and you know like it and share it if you again you see stuff that you really are excited about and I'll be coming out with lots more new videos and so we'll see you again real soon

Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 61,156

Rating: 4.8277984 out of 5

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Id: rJqFxu0Wko0

Length: 31min 25sec (1885 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020