New Tech! * Gold Drop Concentrator!

[Music] well hello everyone dan here with dan here prospecting here welcome back to my channel and if you're new welcome i hope to earn your subscription today i am here at my outdoor workshop with a brand new tool a few months ago like six months ago john from sluice goose the creators of gold drop said dan i've got this new piece of equipment i want you to try out and you know i kind of thought uh maybe send me one i'll see if i like it whatever then i started looking at what it was and notice it is like a fluid bed jig i made a fluid bed jig early in my prospecting career a pulse jet jig and it worked quite well but it was a home-built thing this is professional uses kind of a similar technology and it should be great at separating gold from my concentrates so call them back and said yeah john i like the looks of that send me one and today we're gonna run it through its paces for the first time with the most difficult cons i can imagine my thompson river clones hopefully it can handle the hardest material out there don't know wish me luck and i hope you enjoy [Music] now sluice gooses gold drop concentrator is like a pulse jig except it doesn't pulse it just pushes water from the bottom up through the main column and as water flows upwards it separates out all the concentrates it gets them all fluidized and separate and loose and what that does is in this main chamber here the heavier materials fall down through the fluidized material the lighter materials float up through it and it separates the heavies from the lights the lightest stuff goes up and out the heaviest stuff falls down into the jar below that is the theory behind it now there's a few more technicals about it all where the water goes in how it mixes it up in the chain the main chamber uh but the general theory is it separates everything gets lots of space between all the particles the heaviest stuff falls the lightest stuff rises i'm going to finish setting it all up and see what we can do now the gold drop uses a 12 volt supply i'm using a big deep cycle battery but any kind of 12-volt supply would work let's connect up and make sure the pump gets going there we are we have everything flowing [Music] nicely now for my setup here i'm using a bucket and bucket setup so all the sand cons all the tailings go into the top bucket the water overflows into the bottom bucket where the water is being sucked up from the pump and pushed back through the machine keep silt and debris from going through the pump and back into the machine also gives us an easy way to grab the tailings afterwards and dump them out and then just continue if this machine does work as well as i think it's going to you're going to see me utilizing it at my trout creek operation we have permits in for a machine operation at my trot creek mine i've got two miners coming up to do two separate operations up there and i hopefully will be doing the cleanups from those operations using the gold drop that's if it works as well as i think it's going to let's test that out today one thing i should note is the cons from the trout creek mine are some of the easiest cons around to clean up where the thompson river cons i have today for the machine are some of the toughest so if it can handle today it will definitely be able to handle the troke creek mine let's point out some of the features this thing has it's got a nice big hopper at the top with water flow into the hopper for washing your cons down into the machine the manifold from the pump has four hoses coming off it a couple of them go to the machine itself but a couple others go to a little sprayer so you can rinse out the hopper you can rinse out your bucket you can do whatever you want with the sprayer and one goes to a scoop so you can scoop your cons out of your bucket whatever and then use water to wash them down again into the hopper a couple different valves on the machine itself the bottom one is the main valve that fluitizes the material and actually starts your separation in the main chamber here oh the main chamber up there but this is sort of the chamber that does the hard work this separates the gold from the black sands and the garnets the really fine separation up here is sort of the coarse separation it gets rid of all your easy light stuff this does the hard work and we have a valve down here that controls the water in it we have a valve up here this one starts the main chamber rotating and mixing up and this other valve up here if it's having a hard time breaking the gold away from the black sands this valve here starts some agitation right in the final cone that agitates everything and will actually help the gold and the black sand separate or mix up so that the gold will fall into the chamber where the hard work is done we have a gate valve down here at the bottom that separates off the um the final jar from the whole machine so you don't have to turn off the whole machine to take your gold out just close the gate valve you can take that out put a new one on open the valve again and you're ready to go for the next run it has a flow meter to help you set the machine so you can set it for just the right amount of water flowing through it to separate the gold from the cons and a valve at the top for you know the hopper he's kind of thought of everything he also sent me a bracket for holding my bucket in a big garbage can that works nicely and all the wires and connectors are all preset so you can just hook it up to a battery or some other 12 volt source john you did a nice job of this machine that's for sure now before i start actually putting the gold rich concentrates in i'm going to try a little bit of this garnet sand i just want to get a good feel of how i run the machine before i put my gold in it so i have some of this garnet sand from my big silver claim there just full of garnets is what i use for making my garnet grab bags and i'm going to put some of this into the machine and see how well the machine can separate the garnets from the quartz and the lighter material in here this will give me a good little test run before i put you know the gold in okay we'll start with one little scoop we've set the um flow for about halfway about 0.5 and i'm going to put a scoop of my garnets in there and see how it starts working so you can see down into the chamber here we have nothing but garnets right now the lighter stuff is up top the garnets are down being agitated by this water flowing up through here and we have the odd garnet falling through into the jar below so it's doing a great job i only see garnets down there i don't see any of the quartz material we might not need much water in the hopper good thing my camera is waterproof okay back to what i was saying we don't have much agitation going on inside the upper chamber here where it tapers down but it still is moving a little bit moving down and in and then that gives a few garnets which means a few garnets fall if i want to increase that amount i will decrease the water flow there we go now we have more garnets falling in hopefully pushing the lighter stuff popping out and garnets are filling the jar looks like i need some agitation up here though so let's get some agitation going a little bit of water there we go we've got some agitation going up there to get the lighter stuff moving up and out you should be able to see most of the lighter stuff up on top here with less water flowing through the separation chamber we got more garnets falling working very nice let's try to adjust that a bit more a little less again yep there's definitely more coming down and in i see lots falling now oh i see some quartz going down so i've increased it again to get the quartz to not fall in but that's looking nice nothing but garnets and heavies falling so i have two different types of garnets in this mix there's the bigger black ones and the smaller gemmy red ones you can see they're both down into the uh into the separation chamber very nicely if you look on top you can see all the lightest material is just sitting up on top not falling through at all like the light quartz up there the heavy garnets are right there falling into the jar beautifully there's probably some iron stone falling in there as well because iron stones could be about the same weight as the garnets i put a white piece of paper behind it so you can see the action inside the chamber a bit better i think it shows off against the white background better than the black background and it processes really quick i just put two more scoops in and you know it processed really quick it brought it down to just you know half cup of material there it's bringing the garnets down nicely and yeah i can't it's working perfect there's not much more i can say about it very easy working perfect for garnets i think we need to clear out the garnets and put some gold in there and see how it works with gold by turning up the percolation water the stuff the mixing in the main chamber the water and it's uh really churning it up now but you can see now the heavy stuff is lifting up and out it's just this lighter debris that's going up into the water and pouring out and again nothing but garnet's falling now the trick here to shut this thing down is you're going to increase your water flow into the chamber okay so that there's no um material in the final mixing chamber the final separation chamber is material free except the odd heavy heavy garnet that wants to keep going so increase the water flow shut off the gate valve take your jar off my jar or garnet we'll put a bucket underneath and then we'll open the valve and everything gets cleaned out we can close the valve there we go we can turn our waters back on fill the system again put another jar on it here's another jar put another jar in place open the valve again it starts filling back up the water and we're ready to go for round two this time with gold now this thing is able to take anything up to an eighth of an inch but as with all gold clean up machines the more you classify it the easier it is for the machine to actually separate the dense black sand from the gold itself so i've classified my thompson river cons down to 16 mesh i figure anything between 16 and 1 8 should be easy enough to pan out by hand anyone should be able to do that now a big difference between my thompson river cons which is gold and black sand mostly and the garnet sand here is well sized this goes up to an eighth of an inch this is classified to 1 16 but more importantly garnets are about six times heavier than water or twice as heavy as the other sand around gold is 19 times heavier than water and about three or four times as heavy as the black sands that are in there so it should separate easier the problem is the gold is so very very thin and flat it's like paper in there and it flutters around the water it surfs or it flies like a kite in the water so that's what makes the thompson river gold so hard to separate is it so unbelievably thin that it flutters and surfs in the water and on the black sand let's see how the gold drop does with that okay well let's see what we can do oh all right we have it we have it set for 0.5 again which means it shouldn't have much falling through at the moment uh we should turn on a little bit of hopper water just a bit to help it flush through and having a look at right now it seems like everything is staying up in the upper mixing chamber in the cone and nothing is coming down into the final separation chamber which i'm good with until i get some more material in there alrighty time to set the water so that it actually starts separating gold so the main chamber here is uh churning nicely i've got the water levels up fairly high so it stays churning and moving everything around the um the separation chamber at the bottom is keeping the black sands up and letting hopefully some gold fall through i may have to adjust that and it's just moving around enough to slowly bring all the gold eventually down to the bottom and into the chamber that's the theory and the hopper is nice and full i've got a fair amount of material up here it's uh slowly feeding in as it has room for more so there we go i've adjusted it down to about 0.3 and black sands are coming down into the final separation chamber and i see flakes of gold all flashing at me all the time not much is making it down past the final inlet there like the inlet there so hopefully it's just gonna be the gold that actually is heavy enough to get down that far and fall through you'll see there's a little bit of black sand that made it down while i was adjusting things that's okay that stuff is gonna be so coarse that it's gonna be easy easy easy to separate from any gold that falls in the jar looking good let's keep adding material you can really see in that cone the material working its way down into the bottom and then the lighter stuff being shot up the middle but all the material is working its way down past that sort of threshold there so any gold i see a piece going right now falls into it anything lighter gets pushed back up and out my thompson river material is very muddy so it is definitely um you know the water is muddy now it's hard to see what's going on [Music] it's about halfway up the main chamber there's about three quarters the way up the main chamber you see it gets smaller and smaller as it gets near the top and then it's blowing out the finest smallest lightest stuff into the box and the heaviest stuff is falling into the jar which is muddy enough that that you can't see right now because i have very muddy muddy material now that will be the coarsest magnetite and hematite and the gold of course but those are easy to separate so i've got it all in the machine now i'm just going to let it percolate for a while i'm going to go have a coffee actually and let it do its thing and separate out the heavies at the bottom kick the lightest out the top and the middle stuff the medium stuff the stuff that's left inside the chamber is actually important as well but i'll explain that when i clean up now i've let this percolate for like 10 minutes now had a good coffee and i think it's time to shut things down and see where i'm at so to shut things down here we want to turn off both of the waters that you know push sand up through the main chamber up and out the top so that no sand is now leaving the top we're going to turn up the water that keeps the sand in the the final separation here separating so some is falling some is going up we're gonna turn that up so nothing's going out the top nothing's going at the bottom anything that was in that main chamber is still in that main chamber and just staying there spinning around nothing is falling out the bottom now i can shut the gate now the gate is shut nothing's falling into there so i can now take off the bottom jar and there's my cons now i was gonna explain to you the difference between in the jar in the chamber and in the tailings hopefully there's no gold in the tailings in the jar is anything that is big and heavy enough that what we set the water to let through was let through so we set it to a certain degree to let a certain size of heavies through and those should all be the jar up in the chamber still should be anything that the water was set too high to let drop but the main agitation water up here wasn't high enough to blow out the top so there still is good material in here so when we go and clean this up we want to take the high grades we want to take the mid grades we want to throw out the tailings if you are using this machine in a big plaster operation or a daily use machine type thing i would suggest leaving the stuff in here basically permanently clean that out once a week or something where you can clean this out daily anything that's in this chamber that is gold should stay in that chamber basically permanently let's go see what was in the jar so the heavies of the heavies these are all the big round grains of magnetite those are big and heavy and sort of dense enough because they're round to fall through that water column we shake those away and they shake away really easy because they're big and round if we shake those away up top is the gold and that separates really easy from those big round grains of magnetite let's get the close-up camera so you can show i can show you that now as i said earlier the big round greens just roll away like they're not even there and the gold is all up there it'll take me 30 seconds if that to separate the black sands from the gold and there it is you can see how well it separated the gold and the lead those are all pieces of lead in there and the black sand that stuff just rolled away like it was ball bearings on ice so easy probably took me 45 seconds might not have taken me 30 to do it 45 seconds maybe to clear that gold from its black sands there's the black sands and there's the gold but we're not done because that stuff still has the finer gold in it hopefully none in there i will check that though this has the finer gold it should still be easier to separate because it's still the coarser black fans so to clean up the main chamber here we can put a bucket underneath it we're going to make sure that the the separation chamber down here at the bottom still has full water flow we're gonna make sure that the upper ones are both turned off we will open the gate valve and let everything flow through we can now turn off the the water down here maybe a few shots of wire to clean things out flush stuff through the hopper there we go we're all cleaned out close off the gate valve we can turn our water back on it's important to turn the water on and off with this gate valve properly so that you don't have sand and gold and whatnot sitting against the gate valve because when you open it you can actually pull it in wreck the seal and probably get some of your gold stuck in there so that's why we turn on the water for the separation chamber so it pushes all the material up we then open and close the gate valve with no material on it just to hint for the use of this machine let's get the water flowing again filling her up with my very muddy water so that was in the jar let's see what was in the machine very hard holding a camera and doing some of these things at the same time it's really nice having two hands to work with there we go all cleaned out let's see what's in there first let's get some clean water here's what was left in the machine i'm going to take a few seconds here and separate out and show you what was left in the machine and there should still be good gold here because the smaller stuff that wasn't going into the jar will have stayed in the main fluid bed chamber and yes i see lots of gold in here i'll take a second clean that out show you what i got and there you are there the gold cleaned up wasn't too hard because again this black sand is all processed so that it's only the coarser black sand that's left the fine stuff is washed away means that it rolls away from the flat flat gold very easily that took me 30 seconds that took me two or three minutes if i was to pan out all of those cons from the thompson river by hand to separate that gold it would have been about three hours worth of separation much much quicker using the machine now because i have two thirds of a bucket i'm not going to pan it all out to see what everything i missed take one scoop from the bottom i'm going to pan that out and see what's in the bucket just give me sort of a good idea of how much went through but there we go in the jar in the chamber in the tailings not too bad so here's the gold from the day high banking at the thompson if i had to guess what that was just by looking at it i would say well it looks like about a gram of gold but the thompson stuff is always lighter than i expect so it's probably only half a gram throw it on the scale and see what it weighs 0.64 not bad so there's a couple hours high banking at the thompson river cleaned up with the gold drop look how flat that gold is from the thompson paper thin i'd say it's paper thin but i think it's thinner than paper so a couple of observations here this machine i don't know if it would be worth it for small scale you know cons from panning because in order to make this sort of pay for itself you kind of have to have volume going through it so i think this would be really good in a larger operation either high bankers dry washer cons or uh in my case machine operation where we're gonna have lots of cons to go through every single day and i can see us setting this up in our gold cleanup tent and having it running for hours you know just put your cons in walk away go have dinner go continue mining whatever let it do its thing get all the settings just right get a nice fresh battery every night don't charge it up with the generator whatever and just let it run and do its thing make sure you have the settings just right so that you're not losing any gold you're getting just the best and anything that stays in the chamber just continue day after day after day with it in the chamber eventually clear out that chamber and get that gold every day you can check what's in the jar every day you can toss out your tailings or make sure that your tailings hasn't got any gold in it again i think i would classify off probably 50 mesh i'd probably take 50 mesh off and do it separate from the the coarser stuff maybe set it aside do it all at once on one day or something like that and for some reason everyone loves garnet so i bet you want to see those garnets that i cleaned up let's get some pictures of those [Music] so here's the material that i was working i didn't do it all this is stuff that is unprocessed i didn't do it all because i want to get to the gold but here's what it looked like before it was processed and here's what it looked like after it was processed that did a nice job but look how clean and perfect that machine made the garnets all the quartz and green stone and iron stone and everything else went away from the original to the cleanup and of course i do sell these garnets on my website at www.danherdprospecting.com now i do have to say a thanks to mark from kelly co for setting me up with john from sluicegoose to get one of these machines to try out if you'd like to buy one of these machines they sell them at kellyco and i have an affiliate link below in all of my videos click on the link goes off to calico you can purchase you know the gold drop or metal detectors or panning equipment and because you're using my affiliate link i get a small kickback for it help support my channel thanks mark thanks john thanks kelly cool now for a first test of the gold drop i'd call that a success it wasn't perfect and i definitely have some learning to do to make tweak it just right but i like the machine and i'd say that was a success i do have more things i want to process through it including hard rock crush i think that machine is going to be a dream for hard rock crush because when you crush gold ore it makes small balls or granules of gold that should drop through the gold drop like that so i've got some buckets here of some gold ore from a couple of my minds in my next video i'll be crushing them down and processing them i'll be processing some of the material through sluices high bankers that kind of stuff but i'm definitely gonna try the gold drop with some of the hard rock crush and see how it does i think it's gonna be marvelous hope everyone enjoyed watching this video of me testing out the gold drop for the first time if you did please leave a like below leave a comment subscribe if you haven't already and share the video maybe thanks to everyone that's watching a big big thanks to my patrons out there because of your support i get to offer these weekly episodes of dan herd prospecting if you'd like to learn how to support my channel head off to www.patreon.com damn heard i hope you all have an amazing day out there and until the next video bye [Music]

Channel: Dan Hurd

Views: 338,104

Keywords: fluid bed, jig, mineral jig, concentrator, gold, gold panning, gold mining, prospecting, clean gold, sluice goose, gold drop, video, review

Id: 78IzXNKKxOU

Length: 27min 24sec (1644 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021