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In the meantime

Bet you didn’t think to see a post in March? No, we’re not mining yet. The claim is still snowed in. Spring is in the air though. We’re getting more daylight. I’m seeing puddles here and there and we’re scrambling to get all the routine maintenance and minor repairs done on the equipment. In this post, wanted to share with you something we’ve been working on over dark days.

Have you ever gone crashing off through the brush to try a pan in an out of the way creek you’ve had your eye on, got the good stuff panned down, and SHOOT- you forgot the black sand magnet? Most black sand magnets are pretty bulky and don’t just fit in your pocket. This winter, we set out to solve this problem.

Technology is great, in today’s world, its almost like you can just imagine something and -boom-it appears. Meet the Kudo 3d Titan 2. Its a DLP printer, which basically means it uses a light projector to harden a resin and bring your creations to life. While that sounds pretty easy, this project had a lot of failures before we got a workable prototype. We also had to find the right magnets, springs and glue to assemble the pieces we printed.

We’re calling her “Ruby” until we get a better name. We’re pretty pleased with the outcome. At six inches long, it fits right in your pocket or prospecting kit. The magnet is pretty strong, and its great for getting that pesky black sand out of the way. It doesn’t seem to pick up the gold like the bigger magnets do. One of our friends that has the blue bowl says it’s the perfect size for getting in there without messing up the flow.

If you decide to try one, be sure to give us your feedback. We’d love to hear of any suggestions you have to improve the design. The next post will be about the operation, I promise. In the meantime best wishes to everyone and hopes for an early mining season!

Consider

Karma Points

As July comes to a close, I’m not super happy about the yellow leaves falling from the trees and the fireweed nearing the top. I keep reminding myself that its only August, there is still time…

Been a busy week at the mine, still getting better results than we ever have thanks to our addition of more water to the trommel.

We are also excited to see more and more gold in quartz, for those of you that don’t know, this usually is a sign that it didn’t travel very far from the source vein.

But of course, its mining, so we have to break something. First we shredded one of the belts turning the trommel, spent a few hours replacing them, only to shred them again. Looks like we’ll need to do a little more investigation as to why.

AND just for good measure, we went ahead and locked up the breaks on the backhoe, back to the shop. Again.

Its not all doom and gloom though, results of our mag survey have started coming in. I don’t want to bore you with a bunch of scientific terms, basically this shows hot and cold (high and low) magnetism. The pink areas indicate that there’s a lot of black sand (and thus hopefully gold). We are currently doing better than we ever have and we are only in a red zone.

Though I hate to pull the excavator away from the washplant when we are making good gold, we really need to focus on following up this survey data with test pits, that way I can work on the permits for next year.

Lastly, here is dad coming to the rescue of some poor stranded little fish fry that our daughter found. Maybe we’ll get some Karma points for that.

The Work

What a week this has been! We couldn’t have asked for better weather, 80+ degrees in Alaska means we have to watch each other for signs of heat exhaustion.

First off, a little trommel maintenance, we had to replace a few casters and the motor that turns the barrel.

For sometime, we’ve been aware that we are not getting enough water in the trommel. It’s frustrating to be in good dirt and have to load it a tiny bit at a time in order to not overload the sluice. We did look into getting a bigger trommel, but this time in Alaska there are none for sale (at least that we can afford); so we had to look at a cheap way of working with what we had.

One thing we do have a lot of is pumps. We decided it was worth the extra gasoline to drop another pump in the settling pond to add more water to the trommel. It may look a little silly to just bungee an extra hose into the hopper, but it worked like an absolute champ. We’re now moving dirt like crazy! The loader operator can barely keep up.

The digsite is looking good, we’re running into a lot of large boulders. Those of you who do any prospecting know that the large rocks in a river are a great place to look for gold, it works the same in ancient stream beds.

Though with the amount of dirt we’re moving now, its going to take a while to figure out the new “normal” so we know if we’re in the best ground or not.

We got a request from one of our fans to see more of the “work” involved in the mining process. To our friend in Belgium, this one is for you.

Let’s get some SCIENCE up in here!

Here’s hoping all of you had a great Independence Day or Canada Day!

Big stuff happening at the mine. I may have mentioned that we were looking into getting a magnetometer survey done. We just finished it up and are looking forward to the results.

Just in case you don’t know, basically a magnetometer survey will show us where there are concentrations of black sand, and where there’s black sand, there is usually…..GOLD.

We have 160 acres of claims, we realized that we could spend the next 30 years digging test holes and never find the best stuff. Also because of the terrain and the Forest Service regulations we can’t have a drilling program. The magnetometer was our best bet. Now, to find someone to do it!

Turned out that most companies were not really interested in a small job like ours, they would either not answer me at all or set the price so high that it was unrealistic. Then, I ran across an article about Pioneer Exploration out of Canada being the first outfit to do a Magnetometer Survey with a Drone system that they designed themselves. I figured a place like that wouldn’t give me the time of day; but their founder, Micheal Burns, wrote me right back, and on a Sunday no-less. They gave us a reasonable quote, and we set a date.

It was decided that the best way to do the survey was on foot with a backpack magnetometer.

Michael Burns getting geared up

These guys walked a 20 meter spaced grid over the entire 160 acres through some of the of the most unforgiving terrain imaginable. They got stung by hornets, had to repel across the creek, walked straight up and down in some places, and had no bear protection whatsoever. They were supposed to take seven days to do it. They did it in four.

As you can tell, we are thrilled to have found these guys! I can’t wait to see the data they come up with.

Chasing Bedrock

On what meteorologists where predicting as the hottest day of the year, we came across this bedrock ledge in out dig site. Boy, were the right and in more ways than one!

The most exciting part is that some of the gold is bigger and not flat like most of what we get here. It’s more crystalline which means is didn’t travel far from the quartz it came from.

I managed to get a video of the latest clean out. Enjoy!

Constellation Mining Company

Gold Mining Blog – Alaska Gold Panning Paydirt for sale