Illusory Gold: True Mother’s Burden
Throughout the centuries, man’s search for gold and precious metals has focused on perceptible or visible material that can be extracted from the earth with minimal effort by using gravity and water to collect these metals from the rocks. gravel and surrounding soils.
I am going to talk mainly about gold in this article. Most prospectors and miners realize that gold has a specific gravity of 19.5 and that means it is much heavier than surrounding Earth particles of its equivalent size. For example, a 1/8″ gold particle should easily weigh more than a granite, quartz, etc. particle, at least 4 or 5 times if the surrounding particle is the same size. makes it very simple. to pan gold very quickly because of its weight per volume. The problem is this: gold particles 1/8″ or larger, actually make up a small percentage of the known placer gold around the earth . The fact is: more than 80% – 90% of the particles released (pleasure), the gold on earth is smaller than the human eye can see. We’re talking about massive micron-sized amounts of gold that are actually blown away, run down muddy rivers in floods, and accumulate in small temporary layers during the rescission of flood water.
The vast majority of this micron of gold cannot be filtered or extracted in river or stream water due to the viscosity index of the water itself. Micron gold particles will be suspended and flow out of the tray during agitation. Therefore, the visible gold particles that you can capture when you are sampling an area only represent a small fraction of the gold that you actually return to the river or stream. This is especially true in areas where the viscosity of the water increases due to seasonal changes in the water itself. Things like bacteria, algae, and other organics that make the water less suitable for effective washing.
It is very important to bring your known gold concentrates into a controlled water environment for careful removal of gold particles. Many of you already recognize the importance of careful material selection (grading) to increase your chances of successful gold mining, but there are several more important things you need to know if you want to further increase your odds. In the next paragraph I am going to list several very important steps that will increase your gold yield possibly up to 3 or 4 times if you are careful with your material and follow these steps.
– The water environment is important for all fine gold mining methods including: hand pan, spiral wheel, shake table, blue bowl, etc., etc.
– Clean, warm water above 90 degrees helps decrease buoyancy and helps prevent gold microparticles from floating away.
– Additives such as thinners and surfactants help control the viscosity of the water.
There are many other tricks that we will talk about later. For now we will discuss the best way we have discovered to capture Micron Gold particles at a much higher percentage than other known methods. This captured material must be taken to a controlled process, not to the river or stream. Separation of material in the river or stream will absolutely result in a measurable loss of gold.
My wife, Sharon, and I have been panning for gold since the early 1980’s and we have certainly caught a lot of gold. What we were missing was most of the illusory micron of gold. In fact, we were losing most of the gold we were looking for. We didn’t realize this until we began to study our tailings very carefully under microscope magnification.
One early spring day in April 2010, Sharon Eckley had an amazing idea about natural water flow activities in our nearby mountain canyons. She began to draw sketches of the way rivers cut through the landscape of the earth. She mentioned to me that the largest amounts of gold we had captured in the past had been extracted from the upper layers of river bends after floods and storm deposits. She had the idea to create a lock system that could replicate this proven natural method of trapping and organizing the tiny gold particles into specific layers. I immediately realized that she was absolutely right to think that way. It occurred to me that women are often quite resourceful in their thoughts about relativity or the process, specifically as it relates to scientific discoveries. I believe that women are more in tune with Gold Prospecting than most men realize.
I quickly recognized the possibility of replicating the fluid dynamics of the river’s natural flow, so we built a sluice box that induced a reverse spiral vortex within the main flow path. This first prototype worked so well that we immediately realized that large amounts of microns could be captured in layers. The larger particles of placer gold were trapped at the bottom just like all the other gates we had used before, but now another action was happening.
The hidden Micron Gold was now within our reach and we were taking it home with us! This often yields over 4-5x more gold per catch.
