Gold & Silver from a Secret Gold Mine - Crushing, Smelting and Refining Process

hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and metals and this is the video we have all been waiting for these are those 18 sacks that I pulled out of my new secret mine in eastern Oregon and today is the day we're gonna get them crushed through the system behind me and figure out how much gold is in them now if you want to review the video where I go underground and get these sacks and you can take a tour of the underground gold mine I will put that shot right after this one so you can get caught up if you want to just jump right ahead and see how much gold is in these rocks I will put a time stamp right up here in the corner so you can jump ahead to where we start crushing and processing the stuff and getting the gold out of it we're back in eastern Oregon we're going to gold mining back here underground in this old abandoned gold mine so in a previous video we were in here we're taking some samples and we found a really really hot spot really really high grade gold it's averaging five to ten ounces we got one assay that was over 20 ounces of ton I think so we're back and today our goal let's go down that hole there back to our high grade area I'm going to knock down as much of that high grade as I can onto a tarp get it bagged up bring it back to the shop and run it through the system so let's go check out what we're going to be working on today and see how much we can get all right here's our first little obstacle we got to go down this ladder down to the second level here it's about I don't know 15. feet or so so get down here onto the lower level and it looks like there was just a heck of a rain event here not too long ago because there's a bunch of stuff it's all washed down here so there's a bunch of water running down these creating little gullies and all this organic matter and junk washed in here and then here right above us if you look straight up oh there's daylight so that's where the old miners onto the surface and we're going to be working up here today I'll put a link for a card or whatever up in the corner if you want to check out our first video where we took these samples but we're going to be working right up here this was the really really rich spot and I've been looking and thinking about this since we were in here and I don't know if it's going to show up very well but there's the vein is striking more or less East-West and then I don't know if you're gonna be able to see this but I'll try and show you up here on the wall right there running down that way is a fault and it kind of offsets the vein right here but there's where the vein comes back and then there's a little hole up to the first level and that's where we're going to be working now I pointed out that offset fault right in there because oftentimes and more and more what I'm finding is where a vein and a fault intersect or two veins intersect like that it becomes very very rich and I don't know if that's where the original mineral fluids came up and then they squirted off in this vein or if there was something happening there but typically when these veins are forming if you get a change in pressure temperature or chemistry oftentimes the minerals will fall out at that location and what better place to do that than intersection of the fault you can see there's some copper staining here the owners told me that the copper staining is a really good indication of high grade he's done a bunch of slab work on this stuff up here you can see there's very little copper staining it's pretty much isolated to this side the football side of the vein and the vein here is probably about 12 to 16 inches wide across there we're gonna and it's really nice because I got this big overhang I can work all the way up I've got a little Roto Hammer chisel thing I've got my hammering chisel I got a bunch of fun stuff we're going to use today but I'm gonna lay out a tarp down here and I'm just going to start wailing away on that thing and see how much we can get well I'm disturbing all kinds of wildlife in here there's a bat flying around let's see if we'll come back again and then there's a pack rat sitting right there in that stall bats in here foreign I've got all sorts of tools here today got that battery powered Roto Hammer I think what I'm gonna use first though is just a good old hammer and chisel see how much I can knock off there easily I'll get worn out pretty quick on that I'm sure of it give it a shot see what I can knock off of there I'm going to be wearing a respirator for the quartz dust there's a bunch of pack rat we'll call it poop for the video down here so I don't want to be breathing a whole bunch of that stuff so I'll be all ppeed up and uh we'll see what we get foreign about 30 seconds into it here and I've already found a huge piece of gold right there and I should have gotten the face when I'm sticking the face but I was so excited to get it out and show you guys but that's a pretty dang nice piece of gold there and then looking up here at the face see if I can get this uh there's kind of gold sprinkled all through it there's a piece there's some there's some more up here right up here I can't I can't see the camera so I hope I'm getting it here but it looks like there's a little swath right right here here to here that's just loaded loaded with gold and and I'm in the copper area where the owner told me to go so I'm just gonna oh boy I'm just gonna start working right in here and uh there might be a little bit more up in here too a bunch of Galena maybe that gray Galena ah but yeah that's that's really really nice looking stuff holy smokes all right well I like the hammer and chisel just because it's a little more delicate and allow me to like I'm gonna I'm gonna try and pry this piece out right here I want to save a bunch of these specimens for the owner he's coming a little bit later today um but let me work with that hammer and chis a little bit more see if we can find some more specimens well I better get some on video here before I hand cob all this out of here um right up in here see the gray I think that's Galena I'm finding it right along with that Galena here's kind of that first strip we were talking about where I saw it all at the beginning I don't see a whole lot here right now um there might be some right up in there I don't know if you can see it right there from there maybe um but it's breaking up really nice and easy I'm hardly I'm I'm spending more time looking at it than I am hitting on it um but after I don't know five maybe ten minutes I probably got 50 pounds in the ground I want to work on this big knob here so I can work it all the way back there's some really good looking stuff back over here but I don't want to be under there hitting and this is all kind of ravelly ground in here and all these big knockers I don't want anything to come down to my head especially as I open up this hole bigger I don't know what's going to happen so I'm just going to be careful and just kind of not work with anything over my head the ground up above looks really good and competent so I'm just going to work this back a little bit and but there's man there's some really really good stuff in here I hope we get a bunch of Goldman to run the equipment oh foreign knocked out of there now and I'm gonna work on getting this big doniger right here out of there I don't like that over my head so I've got this is the second tart full I'm gonna put this in sacks but a lot of nice looking stuff in there I got a couple pieces that's a nice gold on them the tarps working really well I can just kind of get it all into a nice little pile get it up I probably got 75 pounds there so I'll get this cleaned up put into a couple sacks and then we'll come back I'll knock a bunch of that waste off of there and just put on the ground and then I can keep going in that vein that'll open up that vein a little bit more for me everything down has to come up it all comes up this ladder one sack at a time foreign foreign I got a little ladder in my spot here so I can get up and and chisel down from the top and man that is making a huge difference look at the pile of muck I got here it took me about 15 minutes I probably got four or five sacks there and uh oh really got a big old chunk out from the upper section of the vein there and there's a level above me and I think what happened is when they were going through and putting in this level above me uh their blasts shattered the courts down about a foot into the foot not the football but the floor of that upper level and so it made it all real loose and it was super easy chipping but now I've got this big knob here that uh is real hard and I've got this little bottom of around here and the foot wall I think I may try and take out some of that foot wall and then I've got somewhere I can slab this hard vein into um but I'm gonna get all this muck off the floor first and get it bagged up and then see about getting the rest of that big chunk of rain out of there it's good looking stuff the veins really pinching fast up here it's only about I don't know eight inches wide up there and as you can see underneath it pinches down so once we get this big chunk out of here we'll see what the veins doing and what it looks like also up there I'm kind of running out of mineralization so uh we'll see we'll see what happens well I dug a little bit around the football that vein goes back in there maybe eight or ten inches and I really don't like to be picking on the walls much because there's a big slab up there that worked its way down and all this is just kind of hanging here but it's on the foot wall I'm not too terribly worried about it uh so I'm gonna work on this chunk if it was if it was up in the hanging wall you know and hanging over your head like down that Big Slab that's that's no good um but now I can try and just kind of slab that that big chunk into that hole that I made I got my tarp cleaned up we got eight bags of mock out of that and uh that ends up being about 400 pounds that hole up there that I made is roughly a foot and a half deep two feet long and about a foot wide or so uh and so I think for 400 pounds I think that's about three three and a quarter cubic feet so we're right around 125 pounds of cubic feet which I think about what quartz weighs um so anyway that was that was kind of an interesting little calculation but let's get going on this big chunk and see if we can get out of it foreign well it's still pretty hard it's I've knocked a little bit off of there but I'm gonna try one of these Feathering wedges and there's kind of a natural little seam there Dan Hurd introduced me to these thanks Dan he gave me a few as well um so I'm gonna try and drill a hole right in here somewhere and put that wedge in like that and see if I can wedge this just a big old knob off this wall so I'll show you after I get the hole drilled and see if I can video as I hammer that thing down all right I got her in there let's see if I can do all this at the same time kind of I'm kind of purchasing the ladder over a hole sideways in the anyway let's see this works foreign my hammer Drilling chisel away what I broke up there and take a look [Music] [Music] maybe I should have tried to wedge it off that crack all right let's try it this way [Music] something happened there [Music] [Applause] foreign pretty good I'll do that again thank you Dan I got my chisel right in the hole and it's coming [Music] nice well there's our vein got that big old knob knocked off of there got a big old pile of muck here I got a bag up and uh I don't know how many bags I got but I think I can carry about 20 or so back with me I got my little pickup today so I don't want to do a whole lot more work and have bags that I can't take with me so I'm gonna get this bagged up and we'll take inventory of how much muck we got all right guys there's all 18 sacks in the back of the truck every single one of those had to come up that ladder through the underground workings up the ladder and then across to the truck and man oh man am I tired but we're all loaded up so I'm gonna head home be sure to subscribe so you can check out part two and I process all this stuff through our equipment and I hope you guys enjoyed the video thanks for watching and we'll see on the next one so I've got these 18 sacks that have the raw ore in them and I'm gonna start with putting them through this jaw Crusher here this is a six inch by ten inch jaw Crusher and the ore is fed in this Hopper it'll Crush down through these Jaws and come out the bottom into a bucket and once they're all crushed up into buckets I'll bring them over here and put them down through the hammer Mill the hammer Mill is going to take that half inch minus gravel crush it down to 70 passing 30 mesh and 50 passing 50 mesh there's a screen in the bottom half of the hammer Mill with 0.8 millimeter slots in it we feed water into the hammer Mill through the side of the case and down through the top where the ore gets fed that creates a really nice slurry and everything stays in there until it can come out those slots down that orange chute into the distributed trough of the Shaker table once the ore is fed onto the Shaker table it gets evenly distributed through these ports on the distributor trough and all the dense material primarily the gold and silver and any sulfides fall down in these long grooves in the rubber and all this precious metals and sulfides work their way across the table only the heaviest minerals can come up the long grooves Gold Silver and the heaviest sulfides such as Galena they'll work up onto the cleaning plane and down this edge of the table into the number one and number two port as they work their way down the cleaning plane the water from this water bar washes the less dense material away and back down the cleaning plane towards the grooves and the gold and silver make a really nice clean line that works down into the number one there's a number three port here on the Shaker table this is where the midlings go so most of the sulfides will end up here there's a little aluminum splitter right here that you can adjust left or right and that will cut the midlings from the tailings the tailings flow down this pipe into this buried tank and the tailings and water settle out here and the water is recycled and re-pumped back up to the system to the Hammer Mill and the Shaker table for recycling all right we got 18 bags now we got 18 buckets I weighed four of the buckets and then they were 22 and a half kilograms so right in these 18 buckets we have a roughly 400 kilograms for the more we're going to run through our system and a lot of you guys have asked me what happened to the whole TurnKey system you used to have a whole jaw Crusher and conveyor belts and all the stuff I actually had to sell it because there's such a high demand for all this piece of equipment that I've been selling all my demo equipment so to answer you guys this question that's where it went but if you're interested in any of these pieces of equipment give us a call or shoot us an email if you can find our contact information in the description below let's get these samples running we'll see how much gold we have foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign sometimes there's lots of gold in the table and other times there's not there's a pretty good little cloud of gold right here and it seems to be associated with the Galena it's that kind of blue gray mineral out here in front and it seems to be that when there's more Galena there's more gold that's all coming down into the number one right here quite a bit of pyrite in it over here and that's mostly coming into the number two there's very little sulfites coming down into the number three a little bit of quartz and then we got a nice clean cut between the number three and the number four so it's all it's all quartz going that way but yeah it's real spotty some buckets seem to have a lot more gold than others we're down to our last five four five here I don't know if you can tell them the dirty water but I think takes most of that line it's all gold going right down into the number one that's the best line I've seen all day right at the end of the run that last bucket there it comes down number one did you see the pile of gold right there there's a pretty nice Gold Line huh look at that going all the way down that gold is so so fine but it runs all the way down so there's going down to the number one and that goal just runs all the way up the table foreign stuff but we've got some nice calls nice Gold Line all right guys well the Shaker table's finishing up behind me we're cleaning up and brushing down the table to get all the gold off and while I'm thinking of it I want to mention a few things we ask ate it and I stayed about 15 ounces a ton there is not seven and a half ounces in that number one concentrate bucket so I wanted to set expectations early that it's not going to be a seven and a half ounce Pour at the end of this video and the reason why that might be is there's a couple reasons one is something called the Nugget effect when you assay for gold if there's a super super rich area in the vein and you get a little piece of that it can throw off the whole assay and kind of skew your results to show way more gold than if you just go in and take the whole vein so that might be part of it the other part is you saw the gold hopefully in the video it's super super fine we may have a Liberation problem I may be only liberated 30 50 I'm not really sure but I've got a sample of the tailings coming out of the number four trough and I'm gonna get those acid usually it takes a couple weeks so if I don't have the results by the time I post this video I'll put the rest results in the description below so you can check out the assay results of the tailings and that'll tell us how much gold we didn't liberate from The Rock because I didn't grind it fine enough the hammer Mill could only grind so fine but I'm working on another machine here hopefully in the next six months I'm going to show you how I'm going to grind all these tailings finer and release more gold the other possibility is there could be some values locked up in the sulfides not chemically but sometimes you'll have little grains of gold to get grown around by a grain of pyrite or a grain of Galena so there might be quite a bit more value in our number one and number two cons than we can visually see and that will come out with the smelting process let's get the table cleaned off we'll get our number one and number two concentrates we'll go smelting down and we'll see how much gold we have all right here's our number one concentrates the drug weighs about 40 grams 50 or so with the water so 13 100 grams and here's the number two which I don't think I can weigh on this scale oh yeah it's about four kilograms so call it roughly five five kilograms from 400 kilograms is 100 to 1 concentration ratio 80 85 somewhere in there well here's a look at our gold and that was just kind of a quick and dirty pan there's some in there so that's our next step we'll get this in the furnace and melt it down and see how much gold we have and then over here in this pan is the the panning tailings so I'm going to smelt that down separate and see how much gold we have in the panning tailings but there's this gray mineral over here and it's super heavy I believe it's Galena I panned a lot of it out but it is very hard to pan and if we smelt it down and we get just a whole bunch of lead in our button we'll know that's that lead Galena lead sulfide well what I've done here is I've panned down the number one cons down to a small amount and the reason is I wanted to see if I can keep the free gold separate from the other number one concentrates using the panning tailings and the idea is to see if most of the gold is in this stuff is free gold or if there's a significant amount of gold left in the number one panning tailings I tried to keep as much free gold out of this as possible and so what we're going to do is smelt them both down separately if there's a a bunch of gold in here and hardly any in here we're gonna know that most of our goldenness ore is free and I can just pan it out if there's half gold in here and half value in here we're gonna know that there's still a significant amount of gold in the sulfides from the concentrates then we can just melt them all down together and recover our gold here's the enriched number one concentrates that I panned out I've got 86 grams I think I've got enough precious metals in here and I think that sulfide is Galena so I've got enough lead in there I'm not going to add any lead collector here we are all mixed up I edited the formula a little bit I've got 40 grams of silica 120 grams of soda ash and I added 30 grams of potassium nitrate [Music] foreign [Music] foreign foreign foreign well we let the second pour cool down let's get this one weighed it's cooled down enough I can touch it and it should just pop right off of there there we go so there is that that's from our number one panning concentrates 24 grams so that's about three quarters of an ounce and I can tell you from the assays that we did that this stuff should be about 70 percent gold and 30 percent silver according to the assays so whatever three quarters and three quarters is what's that like half at 0.55 ounces of gold and it's definitely yellowish in color but it's quite White a very very light brassy color so that is less than I was expecting I was hoping for two or three or four ounces but let's see what's in that lead that's from the panning tailings of the number one there might be quite a bit of gold and silver in there as well this time's cooled down a little bit now but I've noticed since I've started using oxidizer that I get this interesting little layer on top and so the potassium nitrate that I use must not mix with the slag and so I get this this separation on top of the pore and that's why you don't see that surface of the Sun texture anymore is because this stuff is floating right on top and the surface of the Sun textures underneath so I thought I'd point that out I I have not seen that before but it's kind of cool to see them separate but this is cooled down now so let's hopefully the lead's not molten at the bottom let's see what happens [Music] lead still Moulton sit here splattered out of there son of a gun well this is a nightmare this is exactly what I keep warning everybody about on these videos I I took the temperature on the top and usually when the temperatures below about five or six hundred degrees the lead is solid in the bottom but I'm wondering if this stuff on the top maybe acts as an insulation layer and so this cools off faster than the stuff underneath let me let me take the temperature of this stuff right now so oh yeah see that's still 700 degrees that's way hotter than the melting point of lead so from now on I gotta make sure I get this layer off the top so I can get an accurate reading on the temperature dang what a mess all right well wait the good news is we haven't lost anything so I'll just collect all this lead here this stuff here I'll see if I can break off the slag once it cools down and try and recover the lead where's absolute worst comes to worse we'll just smelt it all back down again and report it holy moly look at this mess so I got lead stuck in the inside of the mold I got lead dripped all down around the outside I'm just gonna I'm just gonna put it back in the furnace and re-smelt it I uh I guess I'll pick out whatever I can here oh see learned from my mistakes don't be in a hurry let the lead cool down thank you well I got upset with it after I poured in the cone mold so I just dunked her in water it's just been soaking in water about three or four minutes so everything should be nice and cold [Music] that's what you're supposed to get is nice solid lead Chunk on the bottom and there's our there's our slag no matte layer in there so that's good I got a nice uniform piece of lead I did not add any lead in there so that is all from The Ore itself so let's figure out how much we got we started with about a kilogram worth of concentrates well it's all cleaned up and it weighs 500 grams so about half of the weight of the concentrates was lead and all your gold and silver is going to be in here it's actually a little bit hard when I when I pound on it I pound on a corner here somewhere and it's a little bit hard so I'm wondering if we got some copper mixed in with it but now we got to get rid of I don't want 500 grams of lead that that'd take forever to keep hell away so what I'm going to do is show you my new trick on how to get all this lead out so I'm going to take our lead block and let me melt it down so I'll turn it back on but it's going to melt pretty quick then I'm going to pour it in water and corn flake it and then I'm going to oxidize all that lead away I'm just going to take our lead and pour it in a bucket of water all right drain the water off and there's what it looks like so I'm going to bring all that out I should have used deeper water because it's kind of clumped together it still has a much surface area but kind of clumped which isn't ideal but we're gonna go with it so let's just scrape all this out into a bin here and you can actually see if you look close it's kind of copper colored some of it so again I think there's some copper in there we'll get that in there keep the water out as best we can now what we're going to do is because we have a huge amount of surface area on the lead I can add a bunch of oxidizer and oxidize away or oxidize the lead and the copper and the base Metals all the junk in there we don't want and all the precious metals will collect the bottom and then we'll have a much smaller button to work with we don't have to keep how 500 grams we might have to keep hell 50 or maybe 20. we'll see what we come up with I've mixed up our metal I have 500 grams of potassium nitrate which is probably way too much but I'm going to pour the coals to it and try and get all these big chunks oxidized I've put in about 300 grams of borax and Hunters borax and about 100 grams of silica sand and that's going to absorb all those oxides we're going to make and hopefully we'll have a precious metal button at the end of our pour here foreign see down there I got a big puddle of a flag down there all right I had it in the water again we'll see what happens [Applause] [Music] junk all right here we go third time's a charm [Music] [Applause] thank you there's our button off the bottom of the second floor weighs 162 grams foreign [Music] [Music] all right so there's 1700 grams we're number two concentrates in there we're gonna add 340 grams a circle sand 1360 grams of soda ash and 340 grams of potassium nitrate so it's 20 silica 80 soda ash and then additional 20 percent potassium nitrate I had to increase our Crucible to number 20. and I'll do two smelts in there foreign foreign foreign on this one this is the number two concentrates all the lead and everything I oxidized as much away and it looks like there's hardly any lead left in the button and I put it in the cupel because it's about the same size so let's see how much it weighs there's it looks like you can't really see it on the camera but it looks like there's some slag left around the outside there so I might have to get that one cleaned up a little bit more but well there they are all three buttons the one on the left is the free gold that I panned out and smelt it down the number one pan and concentrates the middle one is the panning tailings from the number one concentrates and then this nasty looking thing over here on the right is the number two concentrates and they vary in Gold content this one's the yellowest so it has the most gold probably about 70. I don't know if you can tell on camera it doesn't look like it from when I'm filming but this one also has a little bit of tinge to Yellow of yellow so that might be 50 gold and this one is pretty silvery and the silver Sprouts give it away that's more gold or more silver than gold so we have 163 grams it might be half gold maybe 60 percent so what's that 80 grams that's a little over two and a half ounces I believe of gold but what this tells me is I have to do something that I've resisted for years I'm gonna have to make a follow-up video on these three parting with nitric acid and purifying the gold all right there you have it my secret gold mine kinda revealed its goal we've got 163 grams of precious metals hopefully half or more is gold and I've got another video to make so stay tuned be sure to subscribe if you like this one because I'm gonna get some nitric acid part the gold and silver and then I'll smelt the gold down separate for cover the silver and we'll figure out exactly how much gold and silver I have per ton in my new secret gold mine so thanks for watching you guys I hope you enjoyed the video and we'll see on the next one

Channel: mbmmllc

Views: 291,837

Keywords: mbmm, mbmmllc, gold mine, gold mining, gold, silver, gold and silver, mining process, how to mine gold and silver, recovering gold, recovering silver, silver mining

Id: ESumRVEkWyI

Length: 51min 54sec (3114 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022