The Alaska Gold Forums

More math I’m afraid Chuck’s estimate is a bit off. I checked my notes. I walked around the perimeter of several of those tailing piles and estimated their circumference at a bit over 600 feet. Circular piles with near 200 foot diameter, 100 foot radius. Built with a dragline with a a 40 foot boom, ...

I did a little arithmetic and that works out to 0.01 oz gold/yard. For that to pay, you will need a very large thru-put. That means that you cannot gently feed the bucket contents from your bobcat. Rather, you need to be able to dump and run for the next load. You'll be fighting to keep up all day l...

I panned all up and down that creek and found nary a speck of gold. I concluded that either the old timers were very efficient miners (not likely) or the gold was buried too deep for me to reach (more plausible). I did find a bit of color on an undercut bank on the far west bench, but it was not eno...

When I saw the beaver pond, the dam was only 5-6 feet high, but extended almost all the way across the upper valley. To reach those dimensions that you listed, they must have been busy little beavers indeed! By raising the water level and dumping into that ditch, they have actually diverted the cree...

It sounds like you are working farther up the creek just below the beaver dam to divert the water. Yes?

No moving parts, huh? How about this? Add a section of triangular profile screen over an undercurrent sump. Spacing should be less than .030” to exclude blonde sands. Screen sections are not cheap. But they absolutely will not bind. Jet on sump should be less than 1 inch. Not entirely my idea. But r...

Geo, if I might interject a slight improvement on your design that we incorporated on the 40 Mile. It consists of nothing more than an additional bar beneath the plate at the top of the sluice with holes drilled to add more water beneath the punch plate. The additional water was pressure regulated a...

Sorry Jim. I should clarify. I run unbacked miner's moss over ribbed mat in a couple of large beach boxes (think gold cube on steroids. ) Typical angle is around 45 degrees. Gold gets trapped in the loops of the miner's moss, then migrates into the mat as far as possible, and then slowly creeps bene...

Very fine gold still creeps downstream thru backed miners moss. I have much better results using ribbed rubber behind unbacked miners moss. Once on the rubber mat it tends to hang in place better.

Now we are getting into the realm of economics. Or put another way: “how much gold can I afford to lose? The old timers undoubtedly were recovering a good percentage of course gold and nuggets. But the sheer volume of tailings that I saw dictated a very high thru-put. That means that if you are goin...