I run a bucket of muck from an old gold mine and recover some of the gold. It's magic! Key words: Shaker table, gold prospecting, gold recovery, fine gold, photomicroscope, gold assay, gold panning.
Your ingenuity and my curiosity and need for these types of homemade equipment is just what i have been looking for on youtube. I am a prospector living in the NE. Everything is mail order.
Coming back for a second view. I love your homemade shaker table. I would not know where to start when it comes to the electronics part. Best of fortunes!
good find, and sampling the area below the vein was a very wise thing to do. small amount of lye and 15 minutes in a cement mixer with a few round river rocks works wonders if you have one around, but it will settle chunk up again quickly if you let it settle. I get the same thing with pulverized ore. aqua-regia would leach all the gold out of that easily. Great video, and i'm still impressed at your knowledge and skills :)
I like the light idea. I’m have to go experiment with some light spectrums now so I can just pick gold up without hauling a bunch of equipment with me.
That's the size I've been dealing with for awhile now. I've been collecting quartz on my last few trips that is full of gold, but the gold is dust (best way to explain it) especially after I crush the quartz down. It's so small that I have to get out my magnifying glass and pull it out piece by piece and collect as much as I can for smelting. Very tedious.The blue light was genius. I'll have to rig up something like that myself. That could save me a lot of time.
Hi John, Perhaps you can pan it down a bit and then dissolve the gold using aqua regia. It has to be easier than trying to pull out the specks one at a time. When you have the gold dissolved, use zinc to precipitate it. -- Dave
@@orophilia I've tried using lye (which didn't seem to work), but I will try that. It takes forever picking out the pieces with a magnifying glass and tweezers. I'll be dead before I collect enough to mean anything...
wish I had seen the shaker table info before buying mine, expensive. If you want quick return crank need to offset the center of rotation of the motor shaft from the centerline of the shaft at the table. you could make that adjustable about half inch or so. also adjustable rpm would be good. i use variable rpm polisher motor from harbor freight.
Hi Arne, thanks for the great comment. The motor is controlled by a PWM board, so I can adjust the shake rate. I'd love to have a variable shake amplitude but I haven't spent the time to try and build an offset motor coupler that is adjustable. -- Dave
@@orophilia refer back to the video where you put the pad under the soft white and blue light, they were right next to the last nugget you showed. Just be careful with that site material, clay is gold’s worst enemy.
Good afternoon Dave you don't happen to be located near near Riverside California do you? Boy oh boy is our gold fine! I have been studying and working in the dirt around Southwest Riverside County for probably 15 years now. This video is one of the most relative ones I found in respects to what i find . Would love to hear from you. wishing you and your family the best health and happy holidays! - Brian "Perrisite Butcher" Boettcher🎄🥇
Hi Brian, I'm located in the LA area. Yes, the gold is very fine in most of S. Cal. I don't mine, but I love to bum around the desert and prospect a bit. I'm having decent results with my new bump-sluice shaker table with find gold (~100 mesh). If you haven't seen it, please check out the video. I've been out of commission for a while, but I'll soon be back with some more videos, including a new Neoprene mat for the new table.
If you're ever out in the perris area or would like to visit let me know. I'd love to show you you around. There's tons of old workings from the 1800s and later. Due to land reclaiming and shaft closures its kind of an enigma to me. The concentration of tailings and ate more than the pit mines could have created and the MI e entrances have been tnt'd and/or disguised. Plus I'm not a miner or geologist and have 4 kids😂. I do have an effective but not so efficient chain mill that I built. I'm also not a fabricator but weld and have various torches😅. It's not rocket science though it feels like it at times due to the size of the gold. Thanks for replying. This only my third time ever writing someone on here and didn't really expect a resonse. I know this is a really long long reply I'm in the process of making a Shaker table currently does it matter where the oscillating arm attaches to the bottom of the table front back or middle? Please Excuse me if my terminology is off.
Hi Brian. Yeah, the old workings are very interesting and in many cases they are hard to understand. I often don't find any gold where I expected to, but then I'll find gold in other unexpected places. I'm not a miner either, and when I started this adventure several years ago I knew almost nothing about geology or minerology. For me it's an interesting hobby to see if I can find a few specs of gold. I would put the drive near the center of the table if you can. That prevents torques on the table that may cause unwanted,, wierd motion. I haven't tried the off-center approach, so it may still work fine. I don't really know. Good luck!
Are there plans anywhere on the internet for making the magnifier? Do you know what frequency or wavelength the light that makes the gold stand out in your video? I have a uv light that is between 385-395 nm. Thoughts? Thanks
@@orophilia Yup, spectrometry is a technique used to analyze the interactions between matter and electromagnetic radiation. I have experimented with UV before.
Maybe try ultrasound in liquid to settle out the microgold? Adjustable, in intensity to find the sweet spot, with centrifuge test tubes. Or maybe a centrifuge.
@@orophilia was thinking of something packable and battery powered for on claim. Like, sluice, screens, miller table and a centrifuge that fits in a bucket. Might be an interesting design and build.
@@armandbourque2468 Yes, indeed. I've been working toward a kit like that and I'd love to know more about the details of your claim. Is it hard rock or placer? What is the material like, etc.? -- Dave
@@orophilia random fraser river placer sampling with a pan, at the moment. Some creek placer, but salmon regs close off a lot of that. But that's slow, and inefficient, and loses gold. A setup i could pack in, expand, and modify, battery run, would get through a lot more. And i'm thinking that an ultrasound classifier/separator wouldn't have to be that heavy, or have much of a power draw, so less battery weight.
13:02 I get the "settling" differences, sort of, but what about floating gold? - Does surface tension increase with more mud in the water? Can floating gold be somehow forced under the top of the water and/or forced to not float?
I don’t know for sure but I think the surface tension is much less with the mud. I’ve experienced this many times on my shaker table: the gold doesn’t float when the water gets really dirty.
@@orophilia Wow, that great to hear, I feared it was worse with dirtier water; so now I'm thinking I just need more time for the ultra fine gold to settle, with consideration of how deep the dirty water is & how strong the water is flowing as well. Thanks for the reply & sharing your experience.
@@orophilia That test showed some really good results. I was glad to see it. I do a lot of testing muyself and know the effort involved...much appreciated. Jim
What about usingThiosulfate Leaching or cyanide leaching to get the gold into solution? This way you're getting quite a high degree of gold reclamation and with those small flakes they would easily break down into solution. Then you just filter and discard the remaining solids leaving you with a gold-rich solution that you can then process.
Cement mixer and some Mercury nitric acid process or retorque the mercury that's one of the best-looking home made shaker table. What other metal assay reveal.
