The nugget effect is definitely real. In Red Lake a junior hit over 1000 oz / tonne and they still failed mainly because of high nugget effect. The drilled grades were just not there when bulk sampled. The proof is in final recovery. Great points, thanks for the video!
#1 on your likes....your Chicago fan club...copper trending upward !?... selling computer/electronics scrap for gold/silver ...metals recovery Your videos inspire me..and enjoy the subtle humor of J1/2...thanks
Very important topic to discuss. Good job explaining it. I saw a public company announce a headline that hinted at another cautionary tale with the assay labs. When you send samples in they do an initial crush, like "80% to 20 mesh" or something? The pubco had sent in some samples they expected to run that came back dead. Weird, right? Turns out all the gold was in the 20% rejected from the first-pass crush at the lab. They sampled that stuff and were much happier with the outcome. Afraid I don't recall the name of the company... Scary part is that this could be by design (accidentally). What kind of crushing gear was the lab using? If the gold was all concentrated in a harder rock then the lab could always end up getting their 80% of rock sample past the fine mesh simply by crushing the relatively softer (barren) rock. Knowing about "bond work index" isn't just for engineers!
Exactly sometime you never know with the labs. We use an XRF which helps give an idea before the lab its not 100% accurate but itl give us an idea in case a lab results way off.
I've watched all your vids love the channel wondering if you could an upclose with a pointer example of the different minerals in gold ore.thank you from a fellow prospector.
I was going to post the same thing. I'd like to be better able to identify more of the minerals. I'm in Washington state also and we have very mineralized ore on our property but there's a lot of other stuff in it - obviously. I had some samples assayed for gold and silver. Maybe I should send more in to answer my question and have the full spectrum of mineral content done. Another source is the USGS mineral database which you can check to see what's in the rock for a particular area.
Professional prospectors always send in 2 to 4 lbs assay samples that have been broken down from 4 quarter splitting of 8 to 16 lbs of mineralized rock/soil. This gives the true value of the ore instead of spiked grab samples that mislead the true value of the ore for bragging of "I have found a high grade gold deposit", when nothing ever comes out of it but making RU-vid videos for making money instead of actual gold mining production or leasing to large mining companies.
Great info! I sent in a kg of material and got an icp-ms with ultra trace test on on of my sites. I may have gone overboard. It tests for like 60 minerals.
Yes all the main elements we typically do ICPMS 35 with added fire Au mostly what we see here. Gets costly when you do ICPMS with rare earths, Platinum group and gold all in one. Especially if its multiple samples
Good advice... what is assayed cannot be absolute and then how that sample came to the location lest it be directly from the bedrock. But, I am not versed or even a miner afield... just an interest and an observer, though a panner from Indiana... Cheers!
We take 2kg samples of rock chips where we take about 10-20 chips of the best looking material. They crush it and then split the sample to get 50g for fire assay
What you handling is for copper mining with 2 to 1 percent content and the gold value will be in the anode sludge so for every tonne of copper refined 7.092 grams of gold so these samples are not suitable for artisanal mining.
samples will give you a basic idea of the potential in the area you have taken them from and you can then decide on how you might proceed ( maybe some discovery drill holes /trenches) with the rest of your assessment in that area. one thing to depend on results will change frequently !!
Maybe do your own assay with 50 pounds of material. Crush product. Get free mill. Smelt concentrates of remainder using standard flux procedures. Cost much lower than assay and you'll get info for your efforts. Plus great video info for a few years.
Can you send raw ore to smelters directly or do you have to crush it and extract the gold yourself first? Lol and what assayer do you use? If you don't mind me asking? I have only found ones that do gold and silver and platinum etc for a extra fee.
Just wondering if it is possible for An Old Newbie to get some Samples of what to look for ? My uncle gave me a Rock Collection in the 70s . Amazing stuff . Even included a Asbestos Sampl Sealed . But Raw . Tks Guys .
Youngin, why would a prospector waste 15 cents on such. He only wants to know if it contains gold and how much. Powder a small gravel size chip, take a piece of Platinum wire, heat it in the pencil flame of a jewler's pencil torch and dip it in micro cosmic salts and then the powdered rock, stick it back in the oxidizing flame and the color given off will instantly tell you if you have gold. The make a paper holder, put in 100 micrograms of powdered rock, a pinch of borax and a gram of powdered lead, twist it into a little ball and place it on charcoal and fuze it to a lead bead. Take that bead and place it on a cupel and hit it again to drive off the lead into the cupel and the little tiny bead is weighed on a grain scale and you instantly know grams or pennyweight per ton. That takes 5 minutes and cost zero!!! What more can an XRF do? A fire essay might be a tince more precise, but that's close enough for the average prospector. When you threw away the blowpipe tests, you got to big for your britches!!!! How do you think they run down all those mines you explore everyday???
Should you be taking a sample across the whole vein and then crushing and mixing it up? Or do you do that after, depending on samples from individual chunks of rock?
Wanted to ask your opinion if it js okay with you. Outcrops grabbed from on top of the reef on the ground surface fire assayed 0.22g/t and 0.19 g/t respectively. What is your general opinion of this?
What about disseminated samples of gold ore? Would this still apply? You also mentioned copper being over limits. Does too much copper content make it economically unviable because of the cost to separate it? Where do you do your assays and do have the whole spectrum of minerals assayed every time? I thought they crushed up the whole sample and analyzed a representative sample of that making the size of the sample sent in beside the point. I don't know.
Over limits means your sample was over the testing capacity so they run a second test to determine how high. The more copper the better as it would up the ore values. You can have gold evenly distributed but often not because of the way it forms. These assays were do e at ALS MINERALS in Vancouver BC
Assay gives you grades of a portion of the sample you choose. A drill hole gives you an idea of bedrock geology and deposit over a depth, you still need to assay. Usually you will cut the core in half with a rock saw and use half for assays half for reference or future testing. You will test mineral over a certian depth something like at 10m in the core you intercept 5m of chalcopyrite you would assay all 5m to get a average over the 5m deposit.
Hello friends 911. My father used to say "to earn money, you must invest money." Greetings from Caracas Venezuela. It would be more economical for you to extract the minerals, gold, silver and copper from an amalgam extracted from one of your mining tests using aqua regia or chemicals that allow me to separate the mineral such as Nitric Acid and Hydrochloric Acid. Hola amigos 911. Decía mi padre “para ganar dinero, debes invertir dinero”. Saludos desde Caracas Venezuela. Sería más económico que ustedes realizaran la extracción de los minerales, oro, plata y cobre de una amalgama extraída de una de sus pruebas mineras utilizando agua regia o químicos que me permitan separar el mineral como el Ácido Nítrico y Ácido Clorhídrico.
