Hey guys, my name is Jason with Mount
Baker Mining and Metals and on today's video we're gonna run a sample of ore through
our turnkey system behind me. So on one of the previous videos I did, I went out
and collected some hand-picked samples off an old ore dump pile, brought them
back, crushed them down, and sampled them and got some pretty good results. So
since then I've gone back I've sampled I got a bigger bulk sample from that dump
pile. I brought back 250 kilograms and we're gonna run it through the jaw
crusher, hammer mill, and onto the shaker table and do an analysis of the ore. And
we're going to look at the percent recovery, we're gonna figure out how much
free gold we have, how much is left of the tailings, but first I wanted to show
you the characteristic of the ore we're going to be running. This is a vein
quartz ore. It's got some sulfides in it, primarily pyrrhotite, there's also a
little bit of chalcopyrite. And now with the price of gold being up, this dump
pile may be profitable to process. So here's a quick walkthrough of our one
ton per hour turnkey system. It starts here with 8 inch by 12 inch jaw crusher
module. You fill the hopper with ore, it vibrates the material down through the
jaw crusher where it gets crushed to about three-quarter inch minus... then falls down onto this conveyor belt, comes
up into this fine ore bin here. And this collects the material because the jaw
crusher can crush fast and it has surges this is the ore bin that holds the
material, and then we have a feeder out the bottom that you can adjust and
evenly measure the feed rate out onto this conveyor which goes up
into our 16 inch by 12 inch hammer mill. This hammer mill has a 0.8
millimeter screen in it. And with that size screen the crush size is about 70%
passing a 30 mesh and 50% passing a 50 mesh screen. In the hammer mill we have
20 high chrome iron hammers, which are very abrasion resistant, and they spin
around at about 1,200 rpm and crush the material. You add about a gallon or two
of water per minute to help flush the system. It makes a really nice wet slurry
that comes down this chute and runs right on to our four by eight shaker
table. The shaker table has grooves where the gold comes down and collects in the
grooves. The motion of the shaker table moves the gold and the heavy minerals
and elements across the shaker table to come out these top grooves. The gold and
the densest material will work its way down under the water bar. The sulfides
will form a band that goes down here into the number three port. The gold and all the high-grade material
is going to be collected right here in number one and number two where we can
then pan or direct smelt to recover our gold. The tailings from the shaker table
come down and fall into the spiral classifier here and the spiral
classifier serves two purposes. One, it classifies the material as the fine
crushed tailings goes into the spiral classifier the fine-only the fine
material stays suspended in this Basin and are washed out into the final
tailings pond here. Anything larger than about 200 mesh sinks down in this Basin
and is augured out. Also de-watered with this screw. Now if there's enough the value
left in the oversize material, the de-watered material from the spiral
classifier, these can be reached through a ball mill to release more gold. One of our strategies for developing a
mine site or processing old dumped piles is to start out with a bulk sampling
type program where you can get some equipment on site and do bulk sampling
in the tens or hundreds of tons through the jaw crusher, the hammer mill, and
onto the shaker table. You're going to learn a lot of information about the
amount of gold you have, the percent recovery, the values in your ore, the grind
size... And then once you have all that information, you can make a really good
educated decision about how to improve the system that you have. And so that may
be replacing the hammer mill with a ball mill, that may be focusing on grinding to
a finer size, maybe eighty percent passing a hundred mesh. But the whole
idea is to start with a fairly low capital expense. The equipment will give
you the information that you need while paying for itself by processing the ore
you have. And all the tailings, all your material processed you can save. Even
if there's gold left in the larger material, you can reprocess that later. But don't spend millions of dollars setting up a mill before you have the
information get some some good testing done and then expand on that process and
recover the gold that is still in your tailings if there's value to be had
there. The system behind me can process somewhere in the neighborhood of half to
one ton per hour. It's not only bulk sampling, but it's actually small-scale
production. It's large enough where you can process several tons per day and get
a lot of information about your ore, but it's small enough that the expense and
the operating capital is kept fairly low and then if your ore or your dump piles
or your mind proves out and you want to scale up, you can always increase the
size of the equipment, you can replace the hammer mill with a ball mill, you can
get a larger table for more throughput. So our equipment really is like building
blocks where you can start with some equipment and replace the pieces as you
need to scale up or change the design or grind finer where it's not like you have
to replace the whole system to grind finer or replace
the whole system to get more throughput. Here's our samples from the shaker table
and run in our 250 kilograms. Here is the material off of the number one port,
there's hardly anything in there. Here's the number two port, a little bit more
mostly black sands and sulfides. This is our number three middling, we'll take a
sample of this, we'll do a assay here in our lab and then we'll send an assay, a
sample off for assay at a actual asset lab. And then here's the number
four, and we'll do the same thing we'll do an assay on this, try and get a grams
per ton, and then we'll send an assay of the tailings off to a assay office
and get that assayed. Here's the number one from our shaker table, and we'll play
with each one of these separately. So and there's such a small amount of material
here then I'm just going to take it and direct smelt it. I'm gonna put it in a frying pan
put it on the furnace for a minute and dry it out, I'm not necessarily roasted.
But I'll dry it out and then mix up flux recipe and we can get this smelting in our
furnace and recover our gold. We got our stuff drying out and just by kind of
default a little bit going to roast. But we got a pretty well dry, little pellets
here. But now let's dry we'll get it pulled off and that will mix up a flux recipe here. All right so we have our number one concentrates from our shaker
table. We've dried them out, they weigh just right about 200 grams. So we're
gonna mix up a flux recipe now so we can smelt those down and get our gold out. So
our first component is anhydrous borax and we're going to use 200 grams of
anhydrous borax, so the same weight as our material that we want to smelt. So
there's 200 grams anhydrous borax. And I like anhydrous borax because it doesn't
have the water, and it doesn't bubble and boil as much in the crucible, you don't
have to drive off all that water, and that you can use less material because
you don't have the water weight in it. And borax for our flux is a it's an
acidic flux so it makes it real glassy and it's really really good at absorbing
or dissolving oxides, metal oxides, so your iron oxide, copper oxide, lead oxide.
And also, it absorbs all its silicates, so any silica that's in there, the rock
particles, all the junk on that we don't want in there, so that's what the borax
is for. The next one we're going to do is lye. Snd somebody asked me the other day,
that the typical thing is is soda ash, people usually use soda ash, and "why am I
using lye?" was the question. And I use lye because soda ash and lye decompose to
the same chemical when they're heated and they decompose to sodium oxide which
is Na2O. And when you decompose soda ash or when
you heat it up it has to drive off a whole bunch of CO2 before it gets down
to the Na2O. Whereas with the lye you just have to drive off one molecule of
water per two atoms of lye, which is sodium hydroxide, which is NaOH. So you
drive off one water molecule for every two
molecules of lye, and so again you're driving off a lot
less material, it bubbles much less, it has a much lower melting point as well.
And so that's why I like to use lye and and also you don't have to use as much. So with the soda ash, I'd probably have to use 250, 300 grams of the stuff
to to counteract all that that carbon dioxide going off. But for our lye I'm
gonna use 200 grams as well, so equal parts borax and lye by weight. And we use
the lye because it's a really strong base, it's really basic, and when we have,
if you have sulfides in particular, we're gonna put an iron rod in there, which is
going to reduce some of the less reactive metals such as copper and lead
to metallic form. You're gonna form FeS, which is an iron
sulphide, and when you make your slag pretty basic
by adding the lye, it it makes it so the slage can absorb that FeS matte, that
sulphide that we're gonna make. And when you whenever you smelt, you want to
have a slag layer and the collector metal layer. If you have any matte layer
which is undecomposed sulfides, you're gonna have precious metal loss. So that's
why we have our borax (CORRECTION: lye). And then the last one is going to be silica sand. And this
is also a very acidic base or a very acidic flux and it's it does a good job
of absorbing the metal oxides as well. But for the silica we're only gonna add
a hundred grams of silica because if you add too much silica it makes the flux
really really thick and you want your flux to be fairly fluid so the
metals can fall to the bottom and collect in the collector metal, and
you don't want it so thick that it's hard to pour, it gums up, or you have
little metal beads stuck in your slag. You want to talk collect down in the
bottom. So there is our charge, I'm going to mix that up, and then we're going to
put it in a number five crucible here. We're going to put it in our furnace, I'm
going to add an iron rod in there to reduce those other base metals sulfide
and add a little bit of lead as a collector metal. And once we get our lead
collector metal, we can take it over to our cupel furnace, cupel the lead
away, oxidize the lead away, and we'll be left with our precious metal bead. So I
just take like a two gallon bucket put all my stuff in there and you can just
mix it up, you probably want to use a lid. The lye that we use is really
really caustic, and so you don't want to get it in your eyes or around your skin
because it'll start eating you eating you up eating you alive literally. And
then once it's all mixed I'm just gonna get it in our crucible here. And so
here's our crucible, there's our charge. Now it's pretty full, that's about as
full as you want to get a crucible, just because as this heats and expands it's
gonna it's gonna increase in volume just because it's it's getting warmed up
and heated. And then when it's all when it's all liquid it'll actually probably
go down to about half full. But that's another reason why I like to use that
anhydrous borax and lye is because if you have to drive off a bunch
of gas out of this, it tends to froth up and boil and it can boil right over your
crucible all into your furnace. So we'll get that put in the furnace, will get it
heated up. On a cold heat, it usually takes about 30 minutes, maybe 40
minutes for something this size, to heat up and get molten. And then once it's
molten and the reactions have all taken place, e'll pour it into our cone mold
and get the collector metal down at the bottom. It might be kinda hard to see
but our crucible's down in there. Got an iron, it should be a steel, rebar
in there. I've added 50 grams of lead as the collector metal. And on a cold start
like this we're going to heat it up kind of slow, and once it gets kind of
warmed up in there I'll turn up the gas and the blower and we'll really get it
fired. So I can tell by the way it's cooling
that it's pretty basic. It stays molten a long time.
those white fumes coming off tell me it's basic and it's got that white halo
around the cone mold. And as it cools down you can see the convection cells
and what's going to happen here really quite soon is, at the corners and
intersections of all those convection cells, it's gonna start to form a little
bit of a skin on top. And that skin will grow right to the middle of those
convection cells and cover the whole surface. But like I say, when it's very
basic, when you add a lot of lye, it stays molten for a long long time
because lye in particular has a very low melting point. But you can see that
little Berg's of slag starting to form that skin. It's cooled down quite a bit
it's not even orange anymore hardly and it's gonna seal itself off here in just
a second. And hopefully all of our collector metals down at the bottom, well
hopefully it is, and our precious metals are in that collector button collector metal button, and when the slag cools down we'll turn this over and
we'll pull that collector metal button off and cupel it and recover our
precious metals. Anyway it might be hard to tell in the
video but it's just a lead button, there's no matte on top it's just glassy slag all the way down to the lead. So that was a good decomposition of
those sulfides, and the iron bar really helped to take all those other base
metals and sulfides, turn them into FeS and then dissolve them into that slag we
made. So I'm gonna take this, pound it into kind of a block so it knocks off a
bunch of that slag, and then I'm gonna put in a cupel and put in our furnace. So there's our little lead button, I've
knocked pretty much all the slag off it. But it's really hard and you can see
right right right there it's cracking, which tells me there's a lot of other
metals in there other than lead. If it was it was mostly lead and gold and
silver it'd be real soft and I can hit it but that iron rod probably reduced
quite a bit of copper or maybe some other metals in there that are making it
hard and brittle. So we'll see how this cupelling process goes. This is our lead
block from number one. And I don't know if you can see there, but lead oxides
molten and it's kind of running over into the cupel. So let that go and
hopefully get a little gold bead when we're done. All right here's our gold
from the number one. Nice little button there. And it's still smoking hot, but let
me see if I can do this in a video at the same time, it shouldn't be attached
to the cupel, it should just pop out of there, yeah. So there's our there's our
gold bead. And there you go, our bead's cooled down and just from the number one
we got 3.74 grams. All right here's a dried out material from
the number two off the shaker table and we ended up with 1300 grams after it
was dried. So I took that material, I split it in half so I have 650 grams of
the number two here. I mixed it with 650 grams of borax, 650 grams a lye, and 325
grams of silica sands. So it's one part ore, one part borax, one part lye, and half
a part silica. And I'm gonna use this clay graphite crucible. This is I think this
is a number 10 or a number eight and I want to see if the clay graphite can
hold up a little bit better than those fire clay ones for a good eatin up and
and getting dissolved in this basic slag we're making. So we'll get this fired,
pour it in the cone mold. I'm gonna add 50 grams of led to this as a collector. And then I'm gonna have to do it twice because I have so much material I can't
fit it all in one crucible. But we'll get the number two processed and then we'll
cupel down the two lead beads, get them together and see how much gold is in the
number two. Well it's my first smelting disaster. I went to pick that thing up
and I grabbed it with some tongs kind of right right there and the crucible broke
and it flipped on its side and it all is down all over the all over the place. So,
darn. We'll have to get this cleaned up and figure out what we can salvage
and there's, there should be 50 grams of lead and gold in there somewhere so
hopefully we can find it in all this mess and recover it. Okay well here's the
wreckage. So I pulled all the fire brick hearth off and kind of got all the slag
and all the junk in one pile. And funny enough
well that crucible was tipped over and its side there is still I don't know a
little bit a quarter cup worth of stuff in it so I pour it into the cone mold
just kind of more by reflex and that's where most of the lead was. There's the
there's a little lead bead. There was a few little splashes and stuff that I
that I picked up but I'm gonna get this weighed and figure out, I put in about 46
grams. So let me figure out how much lead I have left and maybe we can just go
ahead with with the results without having to deal with this mess. But
just to do my due diligence, either for the rest of this test or sometime in the
future, I'm gonna take all this stuff and crush it up and probably run across the
shaker table, and if there's any little beads of lead or other metals in there
I'm gonna recover them and and smelt them down just so it's not lost. But my
hope is is that most of my metal is is here that I recovered just
kind of by accident. Well we have almost 35 grams worth of lead so we actually
recovered most of our collector metal. So I'm just going to keep going. I lost
about I don't know 20 to 25 percent here. So we can you know in theory add 25%
more metal than we get out of this and I still have 650 grams of the concentrate
that I still got a smelt. So I think if we put a little factor on it at the end
when it's all said and done, we can come out with a pretty good amount of metal.
All right well I need a new furnace anyway. So I got my two cinder blocks
under there. I'm working on a fire brick hearth, and
now I'll put the kaolwool on top. There's our wrap of kaolwool, got our number 12 crucible in
there for size. So now we got to cut our hole and put a top on it. And there we go
I cut a little mouse hole for our torch and I recycled some of this some of that
old kaolwool back on for a top. I got a little different design, I'm gonna split
it in half and see if that works a little bit better. But we're ready to get
going again! Little pain in the butt but we're back
and running. And there's our stuff cooling down. It's
that cool pattern on top as it cools. Those convection cells rising up. And there's our little lead bead off the
top of the pyramid. And now what I did is I actually took all the collector metal
from the first smelt, first half of the smelt, and I put it back in. So I
doubled up this collector metal with gold. So all the gold from the number two
port from the shaker table is here in this bead. And there's our bead. I kind of
hammered it down hammered all the slag off of it. And now we'll put it in the
cupel and put it the furnace. And here's our number two, right out of the cupel furnace. So we've got our little bead there. We'll get her cooled down and wait
and see how much we got. And that little guy weighs 0.30 grams. Here's our
number-3 middlings off the shaker table. And they weigh 9 kilograms, Itook off
about half a kilogram for the water weight. And I got them all mixed up, I'm
gonna take a sample of this, dry it out, and then we'll smelt it down. Here's some
of the number-three middlings. And I've gotten them dried out, about a hundred
grams, smelt them down just like we did with the number one and number two. See
how much gold we can recover from the number three. Here are the last two
cupels this is the number three middlings and the number four tailings. So we'll get those cupelled away and see what the beads look like. All right
guys so here are the four cupels. This is the number one with the big gold bead,
this is the number two with the silver colored bead, the number three middlings
here, 100 grams number three and there's a bead there it's pretty small, and then
this is the tailings that also has a little teeny tiny bead in there. And
again these two both had a hundred grams of material, we smelted all the number
one and all the number two. And I went and got some XRF readings from the
number one and the number two so I'll show you those now first the number one... and now the number two... This one weighs 3.74 grams this one
weighs 0.30 grams, and we'll get these out in a minute here and weigh them on our super fine scale and see if we can get a weight on those. All right, here's our new
tool. We've got a scale that reads down to .0001 gram, so that's a tenth of a
milligram. And a big shout-out to Chris Ralph on this one. I thought these were
you know thousands of dollars and I found them on Amazon for between three
and five hundred bucks so if you need one there they're really not that bad
and they get you down to four zeros of a gram so that's pretty cool. And so you've
got our number three and our number four here, but before we do that we have to
figure out how much silver is in our lead. And so I did a cupel with 30 grams
of lead, and there's a little bit of silver we got out of those. So this
really doesn't matter when you're doing big smelts where you're getting you know
multiple grams or even tens of grams of stuff, but when you're doing these these
tailings samples or these these other little tiny beads, you really got to
figure out how much silver is in your collector metal so you can subtract that
out so you don't you know get twice as much precious metal as you think you do. So let's get our lead collector bead weighed and then we'll know how much to
subtract off our number three and number four beads so we can get an accurate
result. Okay so our residual silver and our collector metal weighs 0.0008 grams and our button from 100 grams of our number three
concentrates or middlings weigh 0.0049 grams. And so we've
got to subtract our 0.0008 grams from that so we really have
0.0041 grams. So the bead from our tailings is 0.0027, but we'll subtract collector metal off there so we really
have 0.0019 or 18. Alright guys I'm just gonna go
over this real quick, here's how much our collector metal
silver weighed. These are the adjusted weights of the beads in grams, and this
is the adjusted weights of the beads for the gold. And I use the same XRF reading
for number two and I just duplicated it for number three and four. And here's our
quick calculation, we're trying to figure out how much gold's in each fraction. So
the number one and number two we recovered all the gold at 3.12 grams. The number three we had 0.0017 grams of gold,
we had nine kilograms the material so there's 0.153 grams of gold in the
number three fraction. And the number four, the same calculation we have 1.80 grams
of gold left in our tailings and when you subtract the amount from number one,
number two, and number three, we add 240 kilograms of tailings. Now let's figure
out our percent recovery. And here's our total amount of gold in the 250
kilograms there's a little over five grams. So multiplying that out times four
you get just over 20 grams of gold per ton, so that's pretty good about, two
thirds of an ounce or so. And then our percent recovery, we add one, two, and
three together we get our 3.273 grams divided by the
total amount of gold and we end up with 65% recovery. So not
terrible for a gravity recovery circuit, I was hoping to get a little bit more
but now let's go and take a look at our tailings, screen our tailings down, and
see if we can figure out where the gold is hiding in our tailingss fraction. So
here's the number four shaker table tailings, and we've got them dried out in
the Sun. Now we're going to take them and we're gonna screen them through a 50
mesh screen and a hundred mesh screen so we'll get three fractions, we'll get 50
mesh plus we'll get 50 to 100 and we'll get a hundred minus. And then we're going
to take each one of those fractions and weigh them to figure out the percent
weight of each sample and then we're going to assay them and see how much gold
is in each fraction and that way we can determine, if all of our gold is in the
50 mesh plus, that we just need to grind finer. Or
if a lot of our gold is in the finer stuff. But it'll give us a lot more
information about where to target for better recovery. This will be another
good test actually to figure out the grind size from the hammer mill. And like
you may have saw in the video when I was taking samples I took them right out of
the number four port on the shaker table, I didn't take him out of the spiral, and
so this has all the fractions that the hammer mill grinds to. It hasn't been
classified or augured out or de-watered yet. Here's our 50 mesh plus, and this was
54% of the total weight. Then we had our 50 to 100, which was 18% of the total weight.
And then we have our 100 mesh minus, which is 27% of the total weight.
And then here's a close up of that third 50 mesh plus. And so you can see it's
fairly coarse you can see the individual grain sizes. It's kind of would be a
beach sand. This is 50 to 100 mesh, and there again you can still kind of see
the individual grains, it would be a fine sand. And then this is the 100 mesh and
smaller and here you kind of lose the ability to see the individual grains,
it's really powdery and a cakey. So that gives you kind of the idea of the size
of the material we're talking about when we talk about mesh size and
different sizes like that. So we'll take each a section of each one of these and
and get them assayed and we'll see how much gold is in each one of these
fractions. And there's your lead button right there.
And it's a little bit hard to tell but there's no matte on top, it's glassy slag
all the way down through it right to the edge of the button. And so we'll get this
kind of pounded into a little bit of a cube, knock all that slag off, and we'll
put it in the furnace and get it cupelling. So this is our little electric furnace
that we're using to cupel our lead. And we have our three samples in there, our
50 plus, our 50 to 100, and our 100 minus And so what actually goes on here with
the cupelling process is the cupels are made of bone ash or I think it's
magnesium oxide which is porous to oxides but not to metal. And so you you
have your little dish you put your lead metal in there the collector metal from
our smelts. As you bring it up to temperature, the lead melts at about 650
degrees or something, so it turns liquid and it forms a layer of lead oxide on
top. And it looks black it looks scummy black. And then as you raise the
temperature more, the lead oxide becomes liquid, it actually melts at 1640 degrees Fahrenheit. And once it melts, it starts to it looks like
a little raindrops on top of the lead metal, and once it becomes molten and
melts, it rolls off the lead bead and when it touches the cupel,
it sucks into the the cupel like a sponge. But the lead metal button is is
impervious or it's impervious to the cupel. And so it just it constantly forms
an oxide layer on top of this molten lead button, the oxides are shed absorbed
by the cupel and that process repeats until your lead button just shrinks all
the way down to a little precious metal bead in the bottom of your cupel. And if
you have you know the button is a huge percent of it by weight is lead but if
you have any iron in there, if you have a little bit of copper in
there, if you have arsenic, bismuth, those will
all oxidize as well and the lead oxide sheds those off into the cupel as
well. If you have too much copper or nickel in particular, the oxides as
they rise to the top the copper and the nickel they have a very high melting
point, and so if you have too much the copper or nickel oxide will actually
cause your button to freeze. And it's not a big deal you just take your frozen
button you put it in another cupel, add more lead, and keep shedding until
you end up with your precious metal button. But if you have too much copper
or nickel you may have to cupel it many many times.
Also with copper in particular if you have a lot of copper those copper oxides
bring precious metals with them as they go into the cupel. And not a bunch, I
mean we're talking maybe 5% of your total button, but it's certainly enough
when you're talking about assaying or getting really accurate you want to be
aware of copper and nickel in particular. So here's our beads from our tailings, 50
plus 50 to 100, and 100 minus. But this cupel I just did this, is our lead blank lead
sample and you can see there is a little bead of precious metals in there. Here's
our 50 plus. 50 - 100. And our 100 - 200. So here's our screen tailings fractions.
There's the weight of the bead, subtract the collector metal, and here's the
weight of our beads in gold and silver. And then down here I've taken out
roughly half of the gold and silver based on our XRF rating and so you can
see where most of the gold is in the tailings. Now I've added the weight
percentages of each so let's do some math and figure out where our gold is
and our tailings. Okay so now here's our three fractions and an example
calculations are 50 plus material had that much gold in the assay bead.
You multiply it by 2400 to get from a hundred grams of our assay to 240
kilograms of our sample size and then you multiply the 0.54 which is the
percent weight of that fraction and that's how much gold you get in that
fraction of tailings. And so continuing our math
down, here's the amount of gold total in our tailing sample. And you'll notice
there's a little bit of a discrepancy here. Our original tailings we figured
there was 1.8 grams and this is about half of that. So you know
there's a little bit of discrepancy in the tailings and surprisingly enough if
you use this amount of gold for the tailings we actually recovered somewhere
closer to 79 percent recovery as opposed to our 65 percent so we're kind
of in that range of 65 to 75 percent recovery probably. And then here's the
percentages of where the gold is so 50 plus has 59 percent 50 to 100 has 34
percent and 100 minus has 7 percent of the gold. And so now kind of continuing
on our train of thought here, if you ground all the material 100 mesh minus and
you end up with 0.240 grams of gold in 240 kilograms, you would end up getting
about 94 percent recovery if you ground it all to 100 minus. So we covered a lot of
ground and we looked at all the details on our recovery and our grind size and
all that stuff. Now I wanted to pull back and look at some of the bigger picture
and do kind of a rough back the napkin analysis of what we could expect if we
implemented the system up near the dump pile in this claim. So we're recovering
about 75% plus or minus and with 20 grams a ton in the ore that means we
recovered about 15 grams per ton. For an operation standpoint, you figure you can
run six hours a day, that's six tons that's about 90 grams of gold. The
operator is going to cost about $50 a ton, the system costs about $50 a ton
to operate. You're gonna need an excavator or loader let's put $50 a ton
on that, and then an extra $50 a ton just for you know being conservative. So
you're about $200 a ton to operate. And let's say we operate for eight hours a
day, so those are costs for eight hours a day, that ends up being right around
$1,500. At 90 grams a gold recover today that's
about $4,500. So you're looking at about a $300 or a $3,000 spread there. And just
for fun, let's double our cost we'll say okay
it's not going to cost this $1,500 it's going to cost us $3000
a day to operate. We're still coming out making about $1,500 a day. So I wanted to
emphasize that around the western United States and the rest of the world there
could be lots of dump piles tailings piles that have now become profitable
due to the increase in price of gold. And so with the system behind me you can see
how easy it is to implement put it on site and start producing gold. Getting a
lot information that you need, getting a gold product. And it's easy to take this
system and expand it into a larger system once you have the information
that you need to do so. Also one of the other things I wanted to point out here
is you don't need to start with a full turnkey system. You can get a lot of
information with just the hammer mill and shaker table behind me, or even a
hammer mill that's powered by a gasoline motor and run down into a sluice which
we're working on and I know a lot of you guys are really excited to see that so
we'll have a video of that coming soon. But the turnkey system is really
designed for people who have some knowledge of their claim, have done some
analysis, and are ready to go for the next step into small-scale production or
bulk sampling. But again for a lot of you small-scale guys or you guys that maybe
don't have the budget or the the tonnage to do one ton an hour, start feeding by
hand and start small and if you prove up the property, get some capital back from
that initial investment, you already have the core components of the turnkey
system, then you can just expand with the jaw crusher, some conveyors, a spiral
classifier and build as you go and kind of bootstrap your way along in your in
your production and in your gold-mining efforts. One of the really important
parts to understand as an operator or a bulk sampler of a gold claim is your
goal is not to initially recover as much gold as you can. Your goal is to get the
information you need to go for the next step for investing in machinery. And so
that's why we did our grind size analysis. With the hammer mill and the
system as it is we're recovering about 75% of the gold, but we found out that if
you can grind to 100 mesh minus, you can recover somewhere in the 90% plus gold
recovery. And so this material here out of the spiral classifier this is still a
resource. This has somewhere in the 3 to 4 grams per ton of gold as it sits. And
so you don't want to throw that away, we haven't lost any gold, the value is still
there. And so as you get your capital up or you're starting to produce a profit
and get some money, you can take this pile and recover the gold out of it.
There's about a $100 - 150 worth of recoverable gold a ton here and
you don't want to throw that away. And that's where ball mill comes in. You
can purchase a ball mill, you can leave the entire system the way it is and
actually if if it were me and I was gonna implement a ball mill into this
system, I take our spiral classifier I put a ball mill right here, I divert the
spiral classifier right into the ball mill, I'd increase the table to a 2-ton
per our table and I'd run the ball mill directly onto the table with the head ore.
So anything that goes out of the spiral classifier into the tailings is true
tailings anything that gets augered up goes through the ball mill and is
reground and put right back directly onto the same production table at the
head ore's running. And so all the values are going to end up going over in the
number one or number two. So that's one way that you can increase your
production or increase your recovery by adding a regrinding circuit to your
production. And so the question we have to ask is right now we're coming to 75%
we can recover 90% if we regrind this but is it profitable to do so to get
that extra 15%? And by introducing a ball mill, which has a very low cost of
maintenance and wear, and if you have a large enough resource through the
tailings it probably makes sense to go after that 100 to $150 worth of
recoverable gold a ton if you can keep the system moving and have the resource
to justify it. The last thing i want to mention is that if you're in the gold
mining industry you know there's lots and lots of properties out
there and there's lots and lots of properties for sale. But whether you're
working your claim yourself, looking to sell the claim in the future, or looking
for further investment, if you have a gold property that's actually producing
gold whether that's run of mind stuff that you're mining or reworking the dump
and tailings piles, having a product that you can make that's gold
and then sell producing off your claim makes your property unique and way way
more valuable and so having the turnkey system producing a product makes you way
more attractive to a potential buyer or potential investors to really increase
your production and get your property up and producing on a larger scale. So I
hope you guys enjoyed the video. If you have any questions or comments about our
equipment or anything you saw on the video today, you can find our contact
information in the description below. So thanks again for watching and we'll see
on the next one.
