FINE GOLD RECOVERY ON THE BEACH OF NOME, ALASKA WITH GEORGE MASSIE - GPAA ARCHIVES

hello folks my name's tom massey and i've got a doozy of a show lined up for you i've got george buzzard massey the founder of the gold prospectors association this guy's probably forgot more about prospecting for gold than most of us will ever know and he's going to be up on that famous gnome gold beach showing you how to get that fine flower gold real educational he's got bob clem along with him and yours truly and you'll notice the camera gets pretty stationary when i'm in front of it because i filmed all these shows up there with him and this is a real educational one i hope you enjoy george buzzard massey well we're out here on the beach and i'm going to talk to you about fine gold recovery you know all over the all over the world really the united states back in north carolina and down florida on some of the beaches and in south texas even in san francisco there was millions of dollars worth of gold taken right off the beaches in san francisco and southern california of course you got gold beach oregon which is really famous and up around crescent city all along the pacific coast and you get up into alaska well you've got cape yak attack and of course the world famous beach at normal alaska which is the uh probably the granddaddy all of them but you've got a lot of beach blasters and a lot of fellas that go out and work them and they learn some really interesting things working beach plasters i've seen guys like uh bug eye brooks that's his nickname his real name is rich brooks and old bug he came up to the beach and he bastard working the beach and saving that fine gold and then he went back into the yuba river uh there in california in one of the rivers where he dredged all the time and he cleaned up his concentrates using beach methods and boy the guys were really surprised at how much goal he was getting and so if you uh if you adapt these uh processes no matter where you go the process is saving that fine gold you can get uh you can get a lot more gold on your weekends and when you go out and there's a lot of fine gold in utah and out in the deserts of arizona it's just a matter of learning how to work that and one of the best places to learn how to master the technology and it's a simple technology of of trapping that beach goal so i want to go over with you uh tried and trued uh a beach operation now let me tell you they're not real pretty they're not yuppy they're not upscale they don't cost you a million dollars you can go and get you some scrap lumber down at the home club or one of the hardware stores close to you and you can build one of these things and i'll show you what kind of uh stuff is built because there's really nothing that's manufactured that'll trap gold like just a regular old beach box will and blueberry john he's one of the guys that about 80 years old 75 years old blueberry developed over the years of 60 years of work in the beach how to trap that fine gold so we have a lot of other fellas and then after i show you this and how it works well we're going to have we're going to have tom come on and bob klim and we're going to we're going to show you some places hopefully that around close to you that you can get some gold but let's just take a look at one of these typical beach boxes like i say it's not pretty to look at but sometimes the things that are that are not too pretty work the best you know and and that goes for men too you know pretty men don't seem to work too well pretty women work awful well but pretty men don't anyway let's take a look at a regular beach box what you got to have is a nice wide box a lot wider than what your normal box would be because what you got to do is you got to spread that material out because on the beach you got a lot of fine heavy sand and that fine heavy sand needs to be spread out with just a little bit of water moving over so that that fine gold can drop out and the other material can move away from it because what you're dealing with is you're dealing with a particle of gold that's much smaller than the surrounding particles of black sand it's in many cases now you will find the occasional nice big piece now even though that particle of gold is 19 times heavier than water or probably two or three times heavier than the other heavy material that it's locked in with it still has to displace that larger piece of material and drop out in that box in all of the mounting equipment that we have we trade off you know nothing is perfect and so we trade off you know a guy builds a perfect gold dredge for the spot that he's working but it doesn't work too well in another spot because the goal can be different so let's take a look at some of the things that make a make a beach box work like i said you spread it out you spread your water out you get your flow down to where it's manageable and no more water no more water than it's necessary remember that that's important and then what i've got here is i've got a rubber matting that goes down here and this is just a rib matting like you would find uh as a walkway you know i don't know any other way to describe it than the black rib rubber matting that they uh that they walk on guys use all different kinds of stuff for this but this reel it's just got a little lip on it here and it's ribbed and what happens is that the gold will drop into those ribs and then the other stuff will wash down now a lot of the gold will come down too but it'll leave a lot of gold up there it's visible and the more gold you see when you see a lot of gold then you take that and you dump that off into a bucket if you can come in here and take a look you can see that we've got gold all in this area here from shoveling into it we got gold all over there so i've got a pregnant mat and i'm ready to pull my riffles up and take that wash it out into a bucket and put it back in here now that goal will move all the way down this rib ribdemating and you can see the black sand here and it goes into what we call a nomad and that's a 3m product and what that is is that's just that woven nomad carpet that they have and we call it miners moss a lot of us and the goal will get entrapped into that along with the black sand and the ruby sand and then when we come out of that what we've got here on the end of it is i've got two henry henry's hooked up one running each way to split that material so that i can handle the flow of water because again i've got too much water for one henry henry so i've got two of them and with a little ingenuity what you can do is you can split that and make three if you've got too much water yet but remember you want to spread that out and make it nice and wide now some of the fellas will take and they make their box and they'll use instead of using two by fours they'll use plastic pipe and all sorts of things and at the gpa i think we've got some plans on how to make a beach box and like i said you can adopt it not only if you work in the beach you can adapt it anywhere that you have this flower gold and i'll tell you something if you trap the flower gold but you can get gold every weekend that you go out so what you do here is when you start to see gold in there of course you want to clean up i hardly see them in my henry henry but i use that henry henry to clean up some of the concentrates from the boil box and the way the beach box works and then of course you want to work your uh you want to make sure that you got a good foot valve and a good pump a good trash pump to work out in the beach if that's where you're working or working the creek if that's what you're doing there and you can just take this simple plastic hose and drill holes in it with a drill motor to make your spray bar you want about a quarter inch hole so that they don't get plugged up with uh with material because remember you're sucking out of the ocean so you have some seaweed and stuff so you want those holes at least a quarter inch and you want that spraying up on your board and when you take a shovel full of material when you take a shovel full of material i got something dumped over here and you put that on there you want to make sure that you throw it up here on that board and allow that to wash down in there real easy and then i've got a quarter inch screen here that classifies the material as it washes over now i'm just going to dump this in here and we'll take a look at what happens down there on my on my mat now you see the material as it's coming on the mat and see it's covered up my gold and it's just kind of working along there and it'll take a while for that black sand to move over there you don't feed your box too fast that's what a lot of people that go out and work the beach their first time they have a tendency to just want to shovel in their box all the time well gold mounting is kind of like the army it's hurry up and wait you hurry up and get out there and then you take your time you kind of wait throw a shovel full up there let it work its way down let that fine go settle along in that rib matting let that wash out of there and you just take your time we're going to take a short break for a commercial and then we're going to come back and i'm going to bring tom on tom's got a lot of places where that this fine goal is occurrence as a matter of fact most places where you find flat plaster gold you'll find an abundance of flower gold seldom though will it be as fine as it is on the beach and because it's so fine on the beach it's it's what they call gold dust you can put some of it in your hand and like that and you can blow it and uh it's just like face powder what i recommend to you that any time that you go out prospecting whether you're on the looking for beach plasters or whether you work in desert closers or wherever but what i recommend to you is that you shovel into your box you collect your concentrates and you dump those concentrates off into your buckets you see my buckets back over here and you dump that into your buckets and you take it home with you because you can't take the beach home with you and a lot of times the surf is up and you can't keep your foot valve out and things like that but what you can take home with you is an abundance of this black sand and this concentrate and then when you're at home uh when when you're in your garage or whatever and you've got your operation set up or if you want to do it like i do and sit right there in front of the tv set in your easy chair with your tub and your gold pan and you can pan out those concentrates and use your sucker bottle to pull it out we're going to take this back to the old buzzer drew's mine and i'm going to show you how these concentrates work but first we're going to take a break then i'm going to bring tom and maybe bob over and we're going to talk about some of the places where that you can go prospecting because chances are there's some of this fine gold right around close to where you live and they'll show you where it's at and i'm going to tell you about the buzzard special because i got a real good deal for you on that and i want to tell you about that and how that you can have a whole lot of different places where you can go prospecting so we'll be right back i got tom massey how you doing tom and tom brought the book along and we're going to talk a little bit about beach blasters tom bob i know you've had some experience on the beach uh what can a guy expect to get in the day out there on the beach well up here in the gnome beach george it's not uncommon to get an ounce or an ounce and a half even two ounces after a good storm yeah yeah well what about like down crescent city california or gold beach oregon or down there on the texas coast those beaches carry gold also and i understand that you can get a half ounce or an ounce down there even you just got to do your prospecting down there and get into a good spot up here it's a lot easier because you've got a lot of good spots but there you got some real good spots but you just got to prospect them out and find them yeah well uh that's uh gold at 350 an ounce that's three four hundred dollars a day fellas you're talking lots of money here yeah it's all flour and gold there's no there's no big nuggets or anything it's just flour gold gold gold but a lot of it tell me something tom if if there's that kind of gold and you're finding that kind of gold and i know you have i know you work north carolina and i know you work california beaches and up in oregon and you can find that kind of gold on me how come more people aren't out doing it well a lot of people don't know they don't know i believe they hear that all the gold's been found ain't no more gold out there but that ain't true only five percent of it's ever been taken out yeah they think of beach to get a suntan on yeah well i understand the suntan the sun rays will work your skin over and call skin catcher you know but this mother nature's welfare system gotta go out there if he don't have a job and he can get gold on the beach yeah yeah but it's flower gold where does a guy sell his goals rob well a lot of guys sell their gold at the gold shows the gpa gold shows and they're advertised every now and then and that's a good place to sell your gold and then also you can sell it to some of the smelters and jewelry dealers and if you have four or five ounces you can sell it to engelhardt well you go through a smelter and they refund and they sell it to engelhardt the best way to sell it of course is that the uh the gold shows and swap meads and places like that they make jewelry they make these little basils or measles and for the right price i'll buy it yeah but you know ladies and gentlemen when i work a beach plaster and this is real good information no matter where you're out prospecting is that i take and i develop the concentrates and then i bring the concentrates back to my my home where i'm set up in my garage to do to work out my my stuff and by that i mean that i don't clean the gold down to it's it's where it's completely clean and ready for sale i bring it back it's still got some black sand in it because i don't take that time away from my field mining and i also do that when i'm working on the river i'll just take the concentrates from my dredge and maybe i'll rough pat them to see if there's any nuggets in there and then i'll dump all that stuff into a bucket and i always carry it back to my hooch what i call my hooch and then we we pan out the concentrates and clean it up with our sucker bottle and stuff like that to find the goal and that's what i do there and i'll show you i have in this pan here some material now i know fellas that work the beaches even in southern california and of course they have to do a little bit more shoveling down there because the the sand is not as rich as some of the beaches are the ones up around well all along the pacific coast and of course uh back in uh in on the east coast around virginia and in that area there's some uh been some reports i've never worked the beaches back there but i've had a lot of guys write me letters and tell me that they have and that it's pretty much the same basically feingold that they find there and then i haven't heard of too many nuggets on the beach at gnome i guess there are a few nuggets that was found but it's it's pretty rare now what i've done in this particular pans i've taken some of my beach concentrates and i've thrown them in my pan here and and and once you get them down you can get them down fairly good by running them through a henry henry that's a piece of sewer pipe that you've cut in half and you got a garden hose in it you spoon your concentrates in there and you and you concentrate it down a little bit more and every one of these steps that you go through just concentrates it down some more so now you'll wind up with some fairly rich concentrates like i've got here in the pen but still got black sand and i will generally take a magnet sometimes and remove the magnetics from that but sometimes when you're dealing with this fine gold a magnet will entrap several of those tiny particles of gold some of them are so fine that they they're just like face powder but but the first step that i do in cleaning that is i'll take and i'll pan that and i'll take that concentrate in the pan i'll spread that out like that now you know to go in there and try to pick every one of those pieces out it's quite a chore but there's a way to do that now blueberry he's got his bounce and and in the gpa tape blueberry john shows his bouts i've got a different method that's simple a lot of different things work and i use it as a tapping method and if you'll just see here i can take and tap on that and the goal will gather up right alongside the edge of the pan like so and that's almost clean with the black sand removed let's just try that again let me dip that down here in the water and i've just got a pinch of my concentrates you know you can pan and sample now one of the best beaches to work is that 40 miles of beach at nome alaska to work for beach placers but even on that beach as rich as that is and you can take almost any pan of material up there and find some gold in it but even as rich as that is you need to take your gold pan and prospect now let's just tap that let that walk over there here let me show you once more let's take this thing let's sweel that around there and spread it out see we kind of just kind of shake it like that and spread it out and then we take and we tap and tap like this on the pan and see all that gold settle up over there now let me show you the next step how we get it out we take our sucker bottle we put a squeeze on the sucker bottle and then we go right in that edge of that pan and just kind of vacuum that goal right up now that goal we got in our sucker bottle see it here see it right there in the sucker bottle we got that and that's nice clean goal we can dump that in still just a tiny bit of black sand but certainly saleable when you got it down to where that it's 90 percent gold you can ship it to a a smelter you know a refiner there's a lot of them around if you don't have the name of them you can write into the gpa and we'll give you now you just spread that around again and you do that process again see we got it there now you just tap on that pan see that goal just walk right up there see it together in that ridge and when you get it to that certain point then you stop you take your sucker bottle take a sicker ball put a squeeze on it and then just vacuum it up and it's a slow process but it's a labor of love uh mining has to be a labor of love by nature when you now you see we we got oh we probably got a penny weight of gold in there what's that worth a penny weight well a lot of people take that and put it in a locket a bezel or basil depending on whether you're from texas or not and i'm not making fun of texans i love texas texas that's where men are men and women are proud of it so it's alaska anyway some people take that and they put it in a little basil or basil and they put on chain around your neck and they sell that for jewelry now what are they getting for that well uh some of them sell that some of the prospectors sell that for as high as uh oh two dollars a grain and in a penny weight there's 20 grains in the pennyweight that'd be 40. uh that uh that works up to uh that works up to about 800 900 an ounce you don't have to dig as much if you can get a thousand dollar an ounce for it your nuggets the coarser stuff like i've got here in this bottle now this didn't come off of a beach but this is of course a goal we're just talking about uh uh what goal sells for a little nugget like this one here this is a fairly large size nugget a little nugget like that probably worth about 25 to 50 bucks that means you're getting if you add that up that means you're getting about a thousand dollars an ounce for your gold i saw some gold from the valdez creek one of the largest mines in the state of alaska and the guy had some nice nuggets he had him down at fred myers he was selling fred mars in anchorage the last time i was in anchorage and he had all this pile of nuggets there and he had 59 dollars a penny white that works out to about 1200 an ounce for that gold that's a pretty good price that's a far cry from the 400 or the 380 whatever the london price is if you take this and ship it to a refiner normally what they're going to charge is they're going to charge your refining fee they're going to take the impurities they're going to ship it to maybe engelhardt or somebody depending on how much you got and you're going to wind up getting a shrinkage of about 20 and then you'll get the spot pricer with a few bucks knocked off and then your refining charge on that so you take a penalty that way if you can be a little bit creative about selling your gold you can get a lot more

Channel: GoldProspectors

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Id: 8jiJOT53OLg

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020