When I was a kid I loved camping, but just lost the desire.
I started out panning, moved into dredging….I had put on alot of weight, deskjob, and was having stress related health issues. If one day I decided the ground was hot enough, and I was motivated enough, Id have to put up an expensive bond to scale up. Since I work an unpatented historical claim as long as I keep my tonnage low and machinery light I avoid alot of the expense of “reclamation and remediation”. Im really just a recreational hobbyist….but I use powered tools I have to file a “plan of operation”. So my operation is more about finding offshoots, and areas that werent considered rich enough to be pursued way back when, while pushing forward along several areas that just hadnt been finished at the last closure in the 40s. My mine has just over 100years of history. The big guys are all about processing tonnage. It becomes very expensive and very bureaucratic if I were to scale up much from where I am at.
Refineries would take either sort, if I had assays done to determine actual content….but as odd as it may sound. My own “tailings” are separate from the historical ones. I do a pretty even mix of new digging and processing old tailings that werent worth it back in the day but are with more modern equipment. I have an extensive tailings pile from the previous generations of miners. I get some decent size chunks of silver and copper though. Nuggets as big as your fist are the dream….I once found one the size of my thumb….but most of my gold ranges from grains of sand to breakfast cereal size. End of last season we strategically placed a number of gold traps so hopefully we will get a decent capture by next summer. At this point we use it more as a campground than a gold claim. With dredging on the same claim I used to pull about an oz every 2-3 days. 75-1.25g/yard) but since CA has a ban on dredging I am lucky to pull an oz or two in a month and its actually alot of work. My placer claim is on a great river (I get between. Ill stick to finding new metals and leave recycling to someone else. Ewaste would require acquisition, storage, processing, and waste disposal….and uncertainty of supply. I have a significant reserve thats right there waiting for me to work it. If the 72g/ton is accurate than sure, a scrap heap is richer than my hole in the ground. So for now, we actually are processing with spring water…and gasoline for the crusher. If I was processing sulphides I could increase that significantly, but my operation is pretty small scale, and we have sufficient reserves to highgrade.
#Old printer rip sides free#
My lode claim averages 42g/ton (1.5oz) in free milling gold. He seems to think its a great business…Id rather work a lode than a load of garbage. Ive no interest but I sold one of my old rockcrushers to a guy whos running PCBs through it. Posted in chemistry hacks Tagged gold, gold recovery, precious metal, silver Post navigationħ2g/ton is the number thrown around on ewaste.
Not too bad, but not something we’d use as a retirement plan. This melting point can be reduced by the addition of borax, allowing the simplest tools – a propane torch and a terra cotta crucible – to produce a small gold nugget.įor three months of collecting, stripping, and dissolving electronic parts, netted 576.5 grains of gold, or at current prices, about $1500 worth of the best conductor available. Gold melts at 1064 ˚C, much hotter than what can be obtained by a simple propane torch. This gold dust was separated from the acid by passing it through a coffee filter and readied for melting into a single nugget. After a week, the acid darkened and the gold slowly flaked off into dust. Everything from old PCI cards, IC pins, and even printers have a non-negligible amount of precious metals in them, but how do you actually process those parts and recover that gold? has a great tutorial for gold recovery up on Instructables for the process that netted him an ounce of gold for three months’ work.Īfter cutting up a few circuit boards to remove the precious gold-bearing parts, threw these parts into a mixture of muriatic acid and hydrogen peroxide. If you’re hoarding old electronics like us, there’s a good probability you have a decent amount of gold sitting around in cardboard boxes and storage containers.
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