The Alaska Gold Forums

Silver is easy to refine; If it's native silver, hand sort and ship it. If necessary, crush and run it through a sluice to concentrate. Silver sulfide; Roast it to burn off the sulfur, Leach the oxide with HCL and precipitate the silver chloride to pure silver metal using lye and sugar. Silver can a...

Silver placer deposits; My silver mine was a lode deposit with Native Silver, Silver Oxide, Silver Chloride, Silver Sulfide and Silver Halite. :) - Geowizard Isn't that a pretty extraordinary size range and composition for one mine Wiz? Jim, The silver sulfide (Argentite) is naturally reduced to si...

I recall you telling about that silver mine. I also remember the difficulty in making it profitable, too. It’s not the same kind of critter as free-milling gold. At $4.00 an ounce for silver, it was marginal. The smelter contract was for silica flux. So, there was a penalty if the silica content wa...

Silver placer deposits; I spent two decades prospecting the Silver Belt here in Arizona. In 1990, I developed a Silver mine sufficiently to ship silver ore to a Phelps-Dodge smelter in New Mexico. Silver placer deposits form just like GOLD placer deposits. Globe, Arizona was named after the Globe Nu...

Silver Assays; From my experience, silver is more abundant than GOLD and usually a prospector will be looking for large amounts of Silver compared to GOLD. The amount of Silver needed to be of economic value is subject to the same variables as prospecting for GOLD. The cost of mining and related exp...

Where AA is useful; If a GOLD prospector or miner has a sample that needs to be assayed, it's important to know what the preferred method of assay is! Most importantly, AA is useful for identification of WHAT the different elements are in a given sample. If the prospecting objective is GOLD, then th...

Accuracy and precision; Accuracy; When we make a measurement, the accuracy of the measurement is controlled by the quality of the instrument used to make the measurement. An example is a ruler. A ruler is an instrument used to measure distance. A poorly ruled ruler from a low cost discount store is ...

Exact amount of GOLD? Yep... The AA spectrometer says precisely 3.2367927 parts per miliion. (+/- 10 percent) Does "Exact" mean "accurate"? or does "Exact" mean "Precise"? Are you "certain"? How many samples were measured and what was the deviation of the samples? What is the "certainty" of the resu...

Selling raw GOLD; When a prospector discovers a GOLD deposit, he or she may decide to go through the process of developing a GOLD mine. At the end of the day... the miner grabs up their poke and makes a trip to a refiner to SELL the proceeds... A refiner charges an up-front FEE for the cost of refin...

Excellent! I have a collection of AA Spectrometers, lamps, burners and autosamplers. I would blush to say how little all of that cost. Yep... Watch the auctions out there. You need a "Lab" environment to set up an AA spectrometer. It needs to be a clean area with room to work. It needs to have clean...