Every week I watch you struggle pouring it into a cone mold. Have you ever thought about putting a bar across an area of where you pour into the cone mold. Use it as lever supporting the middle to back end of the big crucible. I think it would be way easier on your arms and shoulders.
Jason! You have this really casual calm mellow TV personality that I find refreshing if not calming. I love the mix of engineering and chemistry as well. Dan heard is awesome and a different way, he's over the top gregarious! I'm so glad you two work together and partnered on projects.
I was on this claim with Dan last summer, it's one heck of a hike in eh? lol It's an amazing location to pan and im glad you got the chance to join him there!! Cheers Jason!!!
I'm a wallpaper contractor, and I got a chuckle when you busted out the wallpaper smoothing brush to sweep gravel. maybe I can find an application for a gold pan in wallpapering.
Jason, I cannot believe how big the two beads were just from the Fraser's black sands! 😮🧐 I wish you could have recorded Dan's expression as you told him the results! You had a serene look on yours, but your voice gave your thoughts away. That was a very surprising result indeed. Just to give you a hug smile and chuckle, you didn't have to get a new blower. As the old one was croaking loudly, your rooster could have finished the blowing, um, crowing just fine! Tee hee!! 😂🤣🐔 He was a'blowin' while a'crowin'!! 🤣 Thanks so much for sharing with us! You and Dan make a great team. Blessings from Alabama ❤️
Jason, I always look forward to your new videos, and having Dan Hurd as a guest in this one truly is icing on the cake. Thanks for another educational and fun video!
Thanks Jason really enjoy watching your videos and look forward to them . Let me add how impressive Dans Beard is that’s some years of work with that bad boy
This makes me ponder about the absolutely vast vast quantities of mule train and freight train loads of borax that had to be hauled to every smelter in the old west. The work force laboring at that occupation had to have been comparable to those down in the mines.
Just for fun, what I like to do is, simply take those black sands from the pan, where I clearly see some fine gold and put them in a container for later. I then come home, do the best I can to pan out anything not gold and then dry it, and then just enjoy some quiet time, with a desk lamp, pinpoint tweezers and a loupe, taking out every piece of tiny little gold I can find. It ads up to nothing really, but I find the search kind of fun.
13:39 In my City they recently passed a bylaw, called "Backyard Hen Program" .. and at this point in the video, I honesty thought one of my neighbours was harbouring an illegal Roster!!! LOL. But it was just one of Jason's! :) For the record if it was a Roster nearby, I would NOT have reported it .. I grew up on a farm, and woefully miss the Roster call every morning!!! :(
Not to long ago , keeping poultry in city limits was frowned upon to say the least , and it is still that way in a lot of places , especially in upscale locations with an overpopulation of Karen's , who lose their minds at the mere suspicion that a neighbor might possess live poultry . Enter the " chicken clicker " which makes a noise exactly like chickens clucking , made from a plastic drinking cup ( like a solo brand , etc ..) a cotton string attached to the center and and a piece of wetted foam or sponge pulled along the string . You can find these at flea markets sometimes . A few of these played in the vicinity of your local Karen will induce all sorts of entertainment , especially if your particular jurisdiction bans raising chickens .
Hey Jason ! I do enjoy your work. You get along and work well with Dan, it is entertaining. I have always loved 'equipment' and you do have the best toy's.
I've always regretted never going through the Bachelor's program for mining engineering at UNR (J-school Grad) and I really appreciate you and Dan's channels for bringing the history (mostly Virginia City and the Comstock Lode) to life a bit more than I realized.
Spray the cone mold with WD-40 after using to keep rust free, better thermal conductivity and less contamination. Great recovery, Jason and thank you Dan.❤
Great video Jason! I once used a 5 gal bucket and pan, fill the pan quickly pan it down fill it up again until the bucket was done not as good as a sluice but pretty productive
One tip I can share that I learned from bigstackD, a piece of cardboard on top of the firebrick inside the furnace will keep the crucible from sticking.
Thanks, your doing this smelting of Fraser black sand. This has solved a bit of a mystery for me. In the 1950s and 60s, my dad lived in settlements along the Fraser, in the search for the big find in the Fraser, and many of the other rivers in the area. They always made enough money to make the effort worthwhile, but never more than that.. He, and his buddies, always dreamed that they were missing a substantial amount of gold that was locked in the black sands, and your experiment proves to me that it was just a pipe dream. They also postulated, and from what he stated to me years later, they probably made some attempts at mechanically separating any precious metal from the black sands, but all attempts were futile. I can still remember back to the early 1960s, visiting with him in Hope, where he would pull out jars of black sand, stating that there was gold or platinum in there somewhere. It was always on the back of my mind, and I am satisfied that you have solved the mystery. (The reason I mention platinum, is that they also panned rivers as far east as the Princeton area).
I have a jar of black sand and I know that 2-5% of the weight is precious metals. It just takes too long and is not really worth it. Only reason why I keep it, is because trying to separate every tiny spec of gold is too difficult. I know I saw a few specs left in the black sand. Just a matter of some point in time trying to run through a miller table or blue bowl.
@@a.b.c.adventures3484wonder if crushing the black sand would help? There was exp in Yukon where a roller mill at 70 rpm for 6 minutes would fracture the magnetite but flatten the gold then the product went through a fine mesh strainer the sand now tiny went through but gold flatten was retained
yeah..we had one at work that ran for years and years and finally the switch died...so i just hotwired it and we switched it with the power strip....and we used that shop vac a LOT
Saw on another channel that does melting and he puts a piece of cardboard between the crucible and the surface it goes on to prevent it from sticking together. It's another RU-vid channel, so it may not be 100% true, but you may want to try that to prevent the fire brick from sticking to the crucible.
Equipment failure should be expected at the worst possible time. Very enjoyable to see the results. Unfortunately to get enough black sand for a profitable showing it would take more than a few day trips. I imagine Dan could get a few tons over many trips and maybe years but the cost and effort of smelting on a small scale would outweigh the gold recovered. Pan and take the visible gold let the river keep the sands.
A golfball. . yeah them balls are found on the strangest places . i was metaldetecting WW2 stuff and i found one far up in the woods at the foot of a mountain up in Northern Norway where nobody plays golf .. i refuse to believe a golfer was there golfing in that terrain . More like an airdrop
Hi folks, I'm a fan of precious metals myself in the distant Russia, but on the Fraser River the chance of making money on salmon is much higher than on gold. 😊 Although it all depends on the degree of influence on nature. You guys work very delicately. 😅
My God your bedrock there looks like a flint Knappers dream. It all looks to me of some type of Green chalcedony... What I would give to have my billet stones to strike me off a backpack of spawls.
I would love to go for a wk or 2, and just go Dan on some bars along the public access areas! Not lucky enough to know a claim owner, but would love that even more! I know i wouldn't get rich, but after that long, and a little luck, i could get what i need for a tiny home! I know prices, but i also know a private sawmill, and most would come off 10ac! Just a pipe dream, but still feasible!
Off topic..i think you can design a cool roxk chipper to deliver a consistent feed for rock crusher..it would have to be able to go in a trench on be moved and have lateral capability too.
If you want to increase the heat in the furnace you could get an oxygen and hydrogen tank powered by a water splitter and compressors and use that to power the furnace.
I analyzed some of the black sands in the midwest Glacial till rivers and found that the black sands were mostly bornite (probablty of Canadian glacial origin). Has anyone used bornite concentration as a tracking indicator ?
I add a drop or two of oil to the bearings on my shop vac the first time it crows. Otherwise the shaft "rattles" more and more in the sleeve bearings rapidly wearing them out. Oil does attract dust though so not perfect.
The funny part being that placer gold is worth a lot more in it's raw form than in a bead because jewelry makers love raw nuggets/flakes and will pay a premium, that and all the guys selling paydirt (like Dan and Shane Klesh) will pay a premium for it to put it in their paydirt.
Great video thanks Q for you... Can you xrf the black sand? If so, would that not help determine what flux recipe you would need? And another Q, how much would a xrf meter actually set you back? Cheers again for the collaboration with Dan, and producing great content.
25:38 about?? $35 CDN .. that cover some gas milage at least!! .. Nothing to sneeze at!! With a tiny volume of luck and another couple hours of panning ... it easily could have been $100 !! :)
Man I wish I could know when you will be in bc Canada again. I'd love to meet up with you and might be able to get my gold panning brother to join too.
That's a nice bead considering how much black sand Dan has chucked in the river. Probably a couple ounces of metal but I don't know how cost effective recovery would be without a large foundry