How to clean gold concentrates using mercury

[Music] [Applause] [Music] well this video we're going to be going over the method I use to recover my fine gold using mercury now before we even start on the video there's one thing I want to go over and that's in today's society they got you convinced you're going to die if you even look at mercury the man that taught me how to do this process died in his late 90s 98 or 98 and I've got a cat member but he did this several times a week is what he did for a living and he was sharp right up to the last day so the mercury in itself the organic mercury that we you know what we call mercury the shiny metal really isn't that dangerous that the body can't absorb it readily it's when it's in a gaseous form that it becomes really dangerous and part of this process there is some parts of it that are dangerous but there's a few safety precautions and it's perfectly fine and so I don't want to get a whole bunch of comments on how dangerous it is and why I shouldn't be doing all this because be honest with you I'm just going to delete them people been doing this for a long time and yes it does have some risk with it but if you follow the procedure you do it correctly it's you know totally safe but that said let's get on with the petite er now if you watch my other videos you probably know that I do not take the time up in the hills to clean up my gold at all I bring it all down in the black sand and to me the time up in the mouths of this too precious I don't want to spend it you know cleaning up and the larger pieces yes I separate that but the fine stuff it all just goes in a jar and during the winter when it's cold and rainy gives me the opportunity to find some gold so the we work with to begin with everything is going to be dry now the amount of material you you do this with to bury quite a bit now the material I'm going to run today is there's not very much material here there's you know maybe a cup or show I'm not using a lot of material because I want to speed the process up so you get an idea of how to do it not sit there and watch me you know then 20 minutes screening material so the quality everything is the same they just you know the quantities can vary okay with all that said let's look at the equipment now okay these are the tools you're going to need to do this process you need a tumbler this one's a vibrating tumbler I used to have a regular drum one but I wore it out and I got a killer deal on this and now you use a vibrating one I don't think there's fast but they work just as good you need a small amount of copper mercury doesn't take much mercury this is like a quarter of a pound and we'll probably use maybe a quarter of that nitric acid seventy percent there's pretty strong stuff you want to be careful with this coin cleaner comment any type of a fairly abrasive detergent spick-and-span anything like that will work fine you just want to make sure it's something that doesn't produce suds like you don't want to use this soap because you'll end up with a heck of a mess there rubber gloves broadband can't do anything without gold pan the black fan this is a 20 mesh screen basically windows window screen size have here a crusher I made this one out of two old fence post drivers poplin I just cut the handle off it's inside the other ones got a good solid bottom just stuff your material in here and just go to town on it works great because I bottom at a yard sale they can cost my hardly anything and when you impact materials since it's down to the tube it doesn't go flying all over the place and then your good old panning tub and that basically tools you're going to need hey let's get started on the process okay the first thing we're going to do is we're going to screen all our material so we just take a brush and dump it into our screen once again we're using a 20 mesh screen we just want to get all the larger pieces separated from the finer stuff let's hitch this house what doesn't go through the screen will dump out here make sure we get it all out of there now this is what we got left there this is going to go into our crusher we're going to we're going to crush that a little more this material will go directly into our tumbler now this we're going to dump into the crusher and we take this outside since I want to beat my counter up and push it a wee bit okay let's go do that here we have our our material in our a crusher here so all we do [Music] Wow go around and hit a little bit move it around a little bit and that's pretty much about that all we want to do is break those larger pieces up and the final one now we'll pull this out dump it out and take it in and double with the rest of material okay we got our material here out of the crusher what we're going to do now is we're just going to pull that into the shifter make sure everything goes through the screen okay now what we have left here I don't know how I was going to show it but it's just pretty much flattened out pieces of lead and there's a good look at that make sure it is led not gold and it pretty much looks like LED to me except for that piece right there might be gold so we're going to throw that in with the other stuff so this is all dis LED so we're going to put it into a red pile and what we got left here this will all go into the tumbler and we're ready for the next part okay we got a material in the tumbler I got it about half full of wire now we want to add our cleaning agent and I do very much it's really not an exact science here throw the lid on make sure you get the lid down good and tight otherwise it can get messy especially if you got a drum tumbler they're more susceptible to leaking once you get the hood down good and tight just fire it up now normally when I do this I'll do this in the late afternoon early evening and I'll let it run all night and then next morning I'm ready for the next phase you want to run it at least three to four hours so we're going to fire up and we'll be back in three or four hours he okay we're going running for a little bit over four hours now so we're going to we're going to shut her down and take a look and the first thing you'll notice is our nice clean waters not so clean even though this is sand that we've washed you can see that the water is pretty dirty now this water Vin's it were using just a regular household cleaner this water is perfectly safe to dump down the drain dump in your yard whatever there's there's no toxic chemicals or anything and it's just dirt that's been washed off of the the black sand of the gold so now you don't need to clean this before you put the mercury in it I do just because I'd like to see what's going on but you can go ahead and add the mercury to this if you want to and use it the same material like I said it's not a big deal that the cleaner doesn't bother the mercury at all but I like to dump it out and start with clean water so I'm going to pull this off dump this dirty water out and I'll be right back for some clean water okay as you can see we got this all cleaned up now now a couple things I want to cover is when you're dumping this out always dump it into your gold pan or Bowl and they don't dump it directly into the sink don't dump it directly into the yard oh you dump it into another container in case you mess up and you pour a little bit of your concentrates out you won't lose them the other thing you got to be extremely careful do not put your hands in the water right now your gold is clean is very susceptible to oil so if you stick your hand in here and swish it around the oils under skin could cause you gold the float and it will float right out because we have really really fine gold in here and it's really clean now so it's going to be successful to that so you know unless you have gloves on I just say you know don't stick your hands in the water that way you won't lose any gold and make sure you pour into a catch container okay we're now at the point where we want to add a mercury now normally I just pour my mercury directly in and I don't know if you can see or not but there's a little bit of water on top of the mercury you want to keep one on top of your mercury too to keep any evaporation of the fumes out it's not critical but it's just it's just a common sense safety practice so you always keep a little bit of water on top of your mercury and normally I poured directly into the tank but I'm going to pour into a small container here to give you an idea alright there is all the mercury I'm going to use that's plain mercury if I had this thing completely full that's still the amount of mercury I'm going to use you don't need a huge amount of mercury so we'll just pour that directly into there and then we're going to put the lid back on a mercury here now we'll just close her up lid on it cheer up and your mercury is underwater still so not worried about goom's okay we've got a roll sealed up again now we're just going to let it run for you know at least three or four hours we'll fire up and we'll be back another three to four hours okay well we're going to go ahead and shut this down now okay well I went ahead and let that run all night because it was it was getting late and we have in the past now to finish it today anyway so I figure we'll this way we'll get an early start and it'll get to run a little bit more so at this point now what we're going to do is we're going to empty your tub out and take it out man and the next the next couple of steps we got to do outside anyway so I decided to nice day today so I'm going to move everything outside and we'll get set up and do our panning out there okay we got our tumbler here now what we're going to do is we're going to pour everything into our cleanup pan I hope you do is you put it over your panning tub fill er up the water just kind of keep everything under water here make sure you everything goes in the pan okay got it all cleaned out now we do is we just start to pan this out okay one thing you want to do before you start panning is taking your work your your material down to the lower edge of the pan and then pour off all the water then you take your pan turn it over this way and just tap on a little bit we'll go around and you'll see this a ball of mercury that comes out here you want to get that loose mercury out of there right off the bat so we'll take you out of the pan here we'll just pour that mercury off into that pan okay now this is ready to go we can just pan this down we may have to do that one more time before we get it all the way down but we want to make sure that that ball at least mercury doesn't roll out okay I'll go ahead and pan this on down now would they keep panning this down and you want to you don't really have to worry about losing any gold because it should be all gathered up by the mercury one thing I forgot to mention is anytime you're panning in a tub put a drop of dish soap in here so you don't have to worry about your material float now that this soap will break up the surface tension you don't want to put a lot just one drop is is plenty that way you don't have to worry about anything floating at your pan so now we're getting this down to the point we want to test to see if we have another ball of mercury you can tell because you can see it form in your blacks and now I'm just going to tap on this and I don't know if that camera is picking that up there right there you can see it forming there right there it's going to break out and there's your mercury now this is a got a lot of gold in it but we want to get that that mercury out of the pan so we'll just take that and then over here and we just dump it in with the rest of our mercury and then we just keep panning down now we got all the loose mercury out we can pan this almost all the way down now okay okay we're getting this down pretty low now when you starts in a lot of your heavy showing up like there's mercury right there so what what you do now is you just work this around and you'll see that ball of mercury right there fair ball of mercury right here we just want to get that separated out running around make sure everything's picked up then we'll just take this mercury rocker over by itself and with this put that in the pan with the rest of our mercury okay okay now we got this down where we can pan it out real quick we're going to do now is we're just going to swirl this around to make sure that we got all that mercury out of there and I don't see anything but rocks and lead in there nope we're good shape okay now on to the next step okay now for this step you want your gloves on and I forgot to say at the beginning of video oh you're going to need a chamois and chamois take it put it in the water there go away make sure it's thoroughly wet now same as before you always have a safety pan under yeah take your chamois throw it over your pan make a little hole in the middle there take your mercury and you pour it right there and the center of that pen center that chance pull the corners up make sure you got that that mercury in the bottom of the bubble left now I'm going to put the bigger pan in here there we don't take down cats to lose in our mercury and what you do is you just grab this like that and you want to get it good and tight here before you even start up towards the top you want it good and tight then you just make sure you're underwater and you start squeezing it and it will squeeze all that mercury out [Music] now let me get that camera in here a little closer so you can see this okay as you squeeze this out you can see that mercury coming right out of that cami is keep twisting it and squeezing it okay then when I do they open it up a little bit make sure or a little water in there make sure all the mercury is back down at the bottom and do it again you want to make sure you keep it under water when you're doing this and just keep squeezing it can we get all that free goal that are free mercury a today okay I think we got it okay now we have our a pan with a leash mercury in it so we want to put a safety pan underneath as usual I like to use my little hand here to catch the mercury in so it's a lot easier to pour back out of it pour that mercury into there then we take a mercury bottle just put it right under the water and pour that mercury right back into our bottle and just leave the water on top of the mercury the lid back on and I don't know if you can notice but that bottle is just about that full again okay now we can go back to the mercury attend our chamois here the mercury it's in here one open up our chamois and just turn it over read it out make sure we get all that mercury out of there work a little bit thank you for get it all out of there look pretty good trees all want to have the chamois now I put this back into little pan so it's easy to handle and what we have here is our ball of amalgam this has got all our gold in it okay now to the next step [Music] Oh [Music]

Channel: Two Toes

Views: 108,368

Keywords: How to clean gold concentrates using mercury, two toes, gold mining basics, gold panning, how to find gold, prospecting, gold mining, nugget hunting, detecting for gold, gold nuggets, panning

Id: 3NF8Fr5seZ4

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2017