Lesson 4 - Hand Panning Micro-Fine Gold - Also see Lesson 24- IMPROVED Hand Panning ...

you howdy folks I'm Keith Bowen and this is Hard Rock University today's lesson is how to hand pan micro-fine gold now my gold size classification chart goes something like this if I can pick it up in my fingers it's a nugget if I can pick it up with a pair of tweezers its coarse gold if I can't pick it up but when I look at it under a hand lens I see structure I call that fine gold and if when I look at it under hand lens is so small I can't see any structure that's what I call micro fine gold now in order to pan micro fine gold we need a couple things a gold pan I use a smaller gold pan because a little easier to use one-handed instead of a full-sized one you need something to break the surface tension of the water both of these work fine when I'm panning I'll usually use the jet dry because the it doesn't suds as much the Dawn dishwashing detergent does a fine job but it creates more suds which in panning is a bit of a problem when we're using the table I'll usually use a clarifier like this one here it causes the small particles to stick together and sinks to the bottom keeps your water a lot clearer in this case I just put in fresh water so we can see it a lot better it's not that critical to see what's going on at this stage but I want you to be able to see it and last but not least you need some crushed rock this is the sample from half way down the shaft where you saw me hanging from a rope with a Hilty and it's been crushed to approximately 70 percent passing 30 mesh in our RC 46 crusher 2 passes through the crusher now first thing you do if you want to screen out any large rocks so I just got regular window screen here it's essentially 16 mesh and you can see there's a couple large rocks there that will cause problems in the panning process but not anymore I want to get everything wet one reason I put it I had the pan floating on the water is so that all the dirt was confined in here and I can make sure I get everything down first and before it can float off into the pan on the end of the tub I'm going to do it again what I'm try to do right now is get rid of some of the Clay's and the real fine silty like materials make it a little clearer and easier to see now when panning this part goes pretty much like standard panning you need to agitate to where it liquefies and then the heavy stuff will settle right to the bottom I found a circular motion usually works better and your finger should go straight through the stuff that's in the pan to the bottom if not you're not shaking it hard enough once you get liquefied I go to a side-to-side shake now right in here are the heavies from the bottom is there kind of slumping forward when you oscillate the pan when you liquefy the charge the heavies sink to the bottom they'll be sitting here along the bottom and then as you tip it forward the light materials will surge forward much faster than the heavies and get to the lip quicker if you do it fairly smoothly and rapidly then you bring it back and start shaking again the heavies again go to the bottom by doing this you keep the heavies down here and they never get a chance to get up near the lip it's all liquefied now now go to side to side wash stuff off the top bring it back make sure it's liquefied go forward again very slow cuz you don't want to move the material in the pan over the lip while it's shaking what you're trying to do is get it to the lips fairly quickly then stop and use the water to just wash off the top as you'll notice I'm not using the riffles in the pan I finally kind of disturb the agitation a little bit for this kind of fine panning then we're good for coarse gold but not so much for this and each time pull the pan back and then tip it forward while slowing down keep the stratification bring it back and then I start the process all over again what I'm trying to do is keep the heavies in this zone here not get them out near the edge to do that I got to bring it back each time where they're completely behind this line and go forward again now we're getting down pretty close to the black sands I can see the color changing and you get a little bit more gentle now after we pan down to the black sands then we change things up a little bit this has treated water here also now first thing we do is just continue what we were doing but now by panning into another pan we're catching all the materials so we can test it again by repainting it to make sure that we didn't miss significant quantities of regaled as you can see it doesn't take a whole lot of water to pan with when you're using one of these little pans that can be useful at times up till now we pretty much done conventional panning now is where we have to change our modus operandi here in conventional panning you put your concentrates there and then you would swirl the water and try and expose any gold that you might have up till now I haven't been trying to move sideways so much with the erosion is just take the top off now I'm going to go sideways and drain the water so you can see what's happened these are heavy concentrates right here and there you see them floating on the water that is pyrite floating on water that means I need to give a little bit more surfactant here that should not happen as you see they immediately went right down here we have pyrites and heavies and if you try and tail that out what happens is you have some pyrites there that are easily 60 thousandths of an inch or more 16 mesh and in order to move those you have to have a pretty strong current that means this gold is starting to show up a little bit right here will tend to get washed away with before the pyrites move makes it very very difficult to get a separation so we don't pan it conventionally I'm going to take this and put everything back in the front where it was now here's the difference grab the pan and one location in this case I use these ruffles as a reference point and then you need to tap it 90 degrees from that like this what that does and this is 9 o'clock and this is 12 the gold is going to go to the 10:30 location so I did this for a little bit to make sure the the gold has theoretically arrived at its destination and then what I'm going to do is tip the pan this direction because we have a huge pile of material here and I want to start knocking that down there's a lot of gold in here now at this point you can use the water if you want and just wash this material out later on we'll use a wash bottle because it's more precise right here I can see a lot of gold pretty fine gold but it's there right below it I can see a lot of course pyrites and as you go down further you can see much finer pyrites that's exactly what you would expect to see at this point now we're going to repeat the process now as soon as I can see the pyrite start to show right here I stop the tilt and hold it steady because that means I have as much or more tilt than I need I want to keep the gold in place while moving the tailings away you now I very slowly pour out the water towards me here you have gold and here you have pyrites what I want to do is see how far the gold is going this way it shouldn't go past here I can see a lot of gold here and extends to about here this is a laboratory wash bottle I use it because it can be very precise once I wash away the waste I repeat the previous procedure pour off the water again check it with a hand lens and mark the end of the gold here is the gold and it extends all the way around to about there so I mark it right there then I take the wash bottle and wash away the tailings repeat the process now I start tapping a little more gently and I start tipping more away from the holding hand in that direction there here's the gold right here over to about there make the mark right in this area here the gold is above this line right here so I get out the wash bottle clean it again each repetition of this procedure gets rid of between 50 and 90 percent of the remaining tailings you eventually you can get to almost pure gold you can then approximate the amount of gold by I or weigh it if there's enough by using a consistent quantity and comparing panning results to assays you can get pretty good at estimating the grade especially the critical question of profitable or not the speed and economy of this technique makes it very useful in exploration but perhaps even more so in process control where you can observe the effectiveness of your extraction in real time remember these rules always use the same size sample if possible make sure it is representative as possible crush and screen it to at least 16 mesh minus smaller is better add a surfactant to the water pan conventionally until down to a few tablespoons of cons then grab the pan at the 9 o'clock position and tap at 12 while keeping the pulp covered with water at all times tip the pan slightly away from the 10:30 position keep tapping then drain the water locate the gold with a hand lens and wash away the tailings with a wash bottle if you do not see any gold at the 10:30 position you may have too much material over top of it or there may not be any gold in this particular sample just remove the material as if you saw gold there by washing it away at the normal location continue to do this until you can see whether or not there is any gold keep panning examining and washing away tailings until you uncover any gold that may be there and clean it up at that point you can examine it or weigh it to see how much you have in your sample happy prospecting and keep it safe you

Channel: Hard Rock University

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Id: lu1pljXvG2Y

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2015