Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount
Baker Mining and Metals and today we
wanted to do another demonstration of
our turnkey ore system. This is our one
ton per hour system and I want to walk
you through the system and then we can
take a look at some of the ore we're
going to be running and then we'll fire
up the system and see what we get. So it
starts here with this jaw crusher
module, and the ore will be dumped into
the hopper here. The hopper vibrates down
and feeds this 8 by 12 jaw crusher which
crushes it down to about one inch or 3/4
inch minus. It discharges down onto this
conveyor behind me, brings the material
crushed up into this fine ore hopper. The
fine ore hopper is really a holding bin but
it also allows us to meter the feed up
to the hammer mill very evenly.
Underneath there's a feeder that you can
adjust the rate of feed, which meters the
feed onto this conveyor up into the 16
by 12 hammer mill here. This hammer mill
right now has 20 chrome hammers in it
and a 0.8 millimeter slotted screen. And
at this size screen about 70% of the
material passes 30 mesh and about 50%
passes 50 mesh. We run it wet so it forms
a really nice slurry. It'll discharge
down here onto our shaker table, this is
one of our 4 by 8 shaker tables rated at
1 ton per hour. The quartz and other gang
material will flow off into the number 4..
The heavy dense sulfides and gold will
be caught in these grooves, come up under
the water bar. Once it reaches up here
under the water bar, the water washes the
sulfides away that do make it up onto
the cleaning plane leaving a nice clean
line of gold that comes down into the
number 1 and number 2 concentrates. The
shaker table has two safety grooves at
the bottom that run all the way across
and this will capture anything that
doesn't quite make it up into the
cleaning plane into the number one. So
the number one and number two are where
most your values are going to be. There's
a number three port here that the
sulfides will form a band at the end of
the grooves and it will work its way
down into the number three middlings
bucket here. The tailings are set up to
flow into a spiral classifier, and the
spinal classifier has a little settling
basin here. The quartz particles that
settle down through that basin are
augered out and dewatered into a super
sac there that can be either rerun for
liberating more gold if there's enough
values or they can be, they're dewatered
and so they're a lot easier to deal with
and it doesn't fill up your tailings
pond. Tight now we have the spiral
classifier set on the finest setting so
somewhere around 150 or 200 mesh
material is sent to the final tailings
pond. This is a concrete basin we've
buried here for our water and we can
recirculate the water through the system
continuously so you don't have to have
fresh water to run the system. The shaker
table takes between five and seven US
gallons a minute to operate and we added
another one or two US gallons to the
hammer mill, so altogether this whole
system runs on less than 10 gallons a
minute of water and again which can all
be recirculated. So let's go take a look
at the ore we're going to be running and
then we'll get this thing fired up. So
here's some of the ore we're going to be
running today and this is a quartz
hydrothermal vane ore. It has free gold
and a little bit of sulfides in it and
we'll talk about that in a minute. But we
have about sixty buckets of this stuff
to run and we weighed 5 or 6 of them and
it averages about 65 pounds, so we're
running somewhere between 3,500 and
4,000 pounds for this sample. But let me
show you some of the ore here we're
talking about. These streaks you can see
here are the sulfides associated with
the ore. The main sulfide and this ore is
a pyrrhotite,
which is an iron sulfide, there's a
little bit of pyrite and a little bit of
chalcopyrite, but other than that it's
pretty much quartz and a little bit of
sulfides and there's some free gold in
here as well.
Okay here's the number one bucket that
we got off the table, I've panned it
down a little bit. But you can see in the
sun it's a pretty good showing there, a
lot of fine gold. Again this was from
about 3500 pounds of ore and this is the
number one. So we're gonna take the
number two and rerun it and probably got
about two or three gallons of number
two that we're gonna rerun on the shaker
table and upgrade it even more and then
we'll pan that down and see what that
looks like. Okay so we wanted to show you
kind of what we ended up with after our
run. These are the number three kind of
middlings and this is the sulphide rich
middlings that came off the table. And we
ended up with two buckets of these. And
so I've cleaned out the number three
here, this yellow bucket is empty and
I've taken that all the number two and
number one away. And right now we have
three of these tubs of number two. And
the number two is real heavy sulfides
and we're gonna show you now... the number
one, it was easy you can just pan it out
a little bit and you can see the gold
but now for the number two we're gonna
turn the tail back on and I'm going to
clean up the number two and get a high
grade number one with mostly gold, a
little bit in number two but most of
these sulfides are going to end up going
down to number three middlings where
we'll catch. Okay so what we're doing now
is we're taking our number two and we're
rerunning it on our shaker table to
clean it up. And so there's a lot of
sulfides in here with a little bit of
gold and we want to get rid of most of
the sulfides so we don't have to deal
with them. And so we're running them on
the same table that we used for our
production run, but we're using the table
now as a finishing table to clean up our
gold and eliminate a lot of our sulphide
concentrates. So I'm feeding our
number two right down here at the base
of the ramp
going down about halfway down the table
and it's forming a nice wide band of
sulfides that are running down. And we've
adjusted the splitter and the trough
there to capture all the sulfides and
run them back into our number-3
middlings trough, so we're not losing any
of this to tailings this is all worth
saving. But our strategy is to get as
much of the free gold out as possible
that you can then smelt and sell
directly to a refiner rather than boxing
up or putting a bunch of sulfides in a
barrel and sending them off for further
processing. You want to get as much free
gold out as you possibly can. Okay here's
our very very very fine gold that we
ended up with. This is the number-2
concentrates from our initial run that
we've rerun on the table and this is
what came out in the number one port. So
you can see there it sits it's actually
not very much gold but it's very very
very fine it makes a really nice-looking
crescent in the pan. It's easily 325 mesh
minus,almost all that gold is. Okay so what
we're doing now is this is actually
really just a check
I've taken a bucket of our number-3
middlings and we're running it back on
the table to see if we get any gold. And
in the past we found that 95, 98 percent
of the free gold ends up in the number
one and number two so if if we see any
gold up here it should be very very very
little and it should be very very very
fine. So that's what we're doing here and
if we see any gold we'll get the camera
on and and we'll show you what we get. So
we've been running maybe half a bucket
of the number three middlings here and
you can see right here on the cleaning
plane this is that little band of
sulfides and there is no gold to speak
of at all. And so that that tells me that
we ended up with
almost a hundred percent of the free
gold ended up in the number one or
number two. So any value that's
associated with the number three in this
case is going to be locked up in the
sulfides because it's not liberated
we're not seeing any free gold on the
table at all. Okay so here's the gold
that we got from our table and our run
and we panned it down a little bit but
you can see there's there's quite a bit
of gold in there. And this is everything
out of our number one and number two
concentrates. And I've got a fanned out
so you can see the gold but over on this
side there's still a little pile of
black sand that I should be able to
piece of gold on top but there's a
little pile of sulfides here and so
we're gonna take all the material in the
pan, put it into our cast iron frying pan
and we're gonna roast it over our
furnace, drive off the sulfur and then
we're gonna smelt it down into a button. Okay we've got our gold concentrates up
on the furnace there and they're
roasting away, they're just about
finished. And so we're going to take them
cool them off weigh them out and then
we'll mix up a slag recipe. Okay so
here's our 30 grams of high-grade
material from the shaker table. I've
mixed 30 grams of silica, 30 grams of
soda ash, 90 grams of borax, and I added a
little bit of potassium nitrate this
time to see if we can oxidize and maybe
clean up some of that gold a little bit
more. So I'm going to take it take the
top off my furnace here,
pour it right in the crucible, put the
lid back on and we're ready to go.
Okay so here's our pour in our cone mold,
it's cooled down better knock it out in
this steel bin. There's our little button
that's starting to show there. So I'll
bust it out of there with a hammer and
we'll take a look at what we got. So
there's our button. So I'll get some of
the slag knocked off and we'll take a
look and get it weighed. Alright here's
our button, I'm gonna get it weighed out
here on our scale and it comes in
alright just under 16 grams. So it ended
up being right about 1/4 ounce a ton and
that's really a minimum value, I would
actually say that the ore probably is
has a little bit higher grade than that
there's probably some value left over in
the middlings. And in the future I want
to do a video where I take those that
middling fraction and grind it up really
really fine and see if we can liberate
any more gold. So stay tuned for that one.
And then I also wanted at the end of the
video here answer a question we get a
lot is what grade do you need to make a
system like this profitable, and there's
a lot of factors that go into that
question but kind of rule of thumb would
be that if you just have a dump pile or
tailings or something that's sitting on
the surface you just have to go dig it
up, I would estimate that somewhere
around the quarter ounce per ton would
would be enough value to make turnkey
system profitable. If you actually have
to go underground and do some mining to
get it out you're probably looking at
half an ounce plus per ton to make that
profitable. So anyway wanted to throw
those out there hope you guys enjoyed
the video and I think it was a great
example of being able to take some rocks
and in just a couple hours turn it into
a gold button. So you kind of saw the
process from from start to finish there. So thanks for watching hope you enjoyed
it and we'll see on the next video.
