Small Mining Operations
Small-Scale Concentrating and Recovery Methods
April 2011 by Bill McCuskey
The first step in my recovery process after milling the ore to the desired size is to table it. On this particular ore, I get good results milling it to minus 100 mesh.
Dredging Therapy
The big moment finally arrived. With Norm suited up, I pulled the motor to life and felt instantly better. There’s really something relaxing about the sound of a dredge running—they don’t sound like anything else.
Moving The Big Rocks
The anticipation of finding out if the system of snatch blocks, shackles, chokers, anchor points, and the strap binding the massive slab of rock in the bottom of the river would even budge an inch was weighing on me.
The Hughes Creek Placers, Montana
Gold discoveries in the Montana territories sparked a frantic stampede to these bonanza destinations in the early 1860s. Hughes Creek is located in Ravalli County, which is located in western Montana, and the gold here is...
Conductive Minerals and Your Metal Detector
...most prospectors don't even think about the conductivity of minerals, but there are some that do conduct electricity to a certain degree, so metal detectors will respond to them.
Reality of the Klondike
I saw gold this summer. The kind of gold that I haven’t seen since ‘81. The kind of gold that rattles in the pan. The kind of gold that would start a stampede—even in 1898.
Mining Pegmatite Deposits
With successively lower temperatures as the water mixture cools, new sets of minerals are formed and many of those stable at a higher degree of heat became subject to alteration as the temperature progressively moved lower.
Bering Sea Gold—Part II
In last month’s issue we covered the initial discovery of gold, the subsequent gold rush that occurred around Nome, some of the geology of the area and past production. We’ll conclude the article in this issue with a further examination of the geology and deposit types, discuss the resources...
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