[Rockhounds] Any Gold home refiners here?

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Bryan,

Cyanide treatment works best when the ore is crushed; cyanide does not 
recover native gold.

You are correct that the richest tailings have been reprocessed, many 
more than once. I've even lost a collecting location in Michigan from 
reprocessing - it is all gone.

If you find tailing piles of rock, they have probably not been 
reprocessed. There are still a lot of gold ore piles left, and they are 
being looked at again by mining companies.

BTW, My oldest daughter lives in Denver and recently visited an old 
gold mine in the area.  She sent me four specimens from the tailings as 
a gift (I'm easy, give me rocks and minerals anytime, but tell me where 
they came from), selected because they all looked different. One of 
them showed a bunch of 1-2 mm nuggets of native gold on the matrix 
surface. I'm still trying to identify all the odd minerals.

Gold is where you find it, and it is still out there.

Kreigh


On Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008, at 20:58 America/Detroit, J Bryan Kramer 
wrote:

> Kreigh, I thought that I had heard that most, if not all, of the 
> western ore
> gold tailing piles had already been given the cyanide treatment back 
> in the
> 1960's and 70's. There was sort of a second gold rush of people 
> finding the
> tailings and treating them when gold prices spiked back then.
>
> Wouldn't that mean little or no gold remaining?
>
> BK
>
> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 10:28 PM, Kreigh Tomaszewski 
> <Kreigh at tomaszewski.net>
> wrote:
>
>> Kevin,
>>
>> It is not that difficult to make a home smelter that can process a 
>> pail of
>> crushed ore and give you bloom, or maybe a batch of molten metal and 
>> slag,
>> depending on the metal/ore. A length of large diameter pipe (sheet 
>> metal
>> will do), a large and small cardboard tube, some firebrick cement, 
>> some
>> clay, a canister vacuum for tuyres, a flux, and some charcoal or 
>> coke. Plans
>> are readily available if you do a little searching (online or at your
>> library).
>>
>>
>
>
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