Time to start the 2014 mining season! Had the usual first day hiccups. Had to take the big equipment hauling truck the shop for some issues we just discovered. All the atv batteries died. We forgot tools, had to make patch jobs, tempers ran high at times.
The weather was absolutely amazing. I have lived in Alaska all my life and I have never seen 80 degrees in May. Never.
Hoping to fire up our trommel for the first time tonight or tomorrow.
We are tired, sore, and incredibly blessed.
Are you looking to upgrade your prospecting equipment this summer? I would like to give a shout out to our good friends at Gold Fox USA. This video shows their newest product, the Lil Monster, and boy it looks like that name is right on. Wouldn’t it be nice to just shovel in to a rig like this rather than classifying and spoon feeding a sluice? Great American Made product. Check out their website at www.goldfoxusa.com Oh and did I mention you also get a sample of our Paydirt with every purchase from Gold Fox?
Hi everyone, look at our newest toy! We won this on an eBay auction out of California. We feel super lucky, it’s a one of a kind made by Titan Engineering, who builds 300 ton per hour trommels. This is a smaller, portable version and should speed up our process.
Thanks to our family who went and got it from California. Now we have to get it from their house in Arizona to Alaska, road trip anyone?
This here is our little trommel wash plant that we use to run samples in. It a bit clunky, not quite round, but hey nobody is perfect and it works just fine just the way it is. How it works, we will set it up at base camp and after I have dug a sample Hole I will fill my backhoe’s excavator bucket up with the dirt of interest, carry it back to where the trommel is located and then shovel the dirt from the bucket into the trommel. Once we have run the whole bucket through the trommel the we perform a clean out, it is never a lot of gold, but what it does is give us a snapshot of what the ground contains, gold wise, and depending on what we get out of the trommel we will decide to dig or not to dig?……Boy, that seems like a recurring question in this blog. This trommel seems to have very good gold recovery. We did have some grounding issues when we first started operating, if you would touch the trommel you would get a nice electric shock from it. As you all know electricity and water does not mix well. We have since solved that issue because getting shocked every time you touch the machine, just won’t do. These photos are prior to having any of the pluming installed. I will try to find a picture of the complete unit to show off.
At the end of the day we do a clean up of the material we ran all day. We take the concentrates from the big red and blue wash plant, then run that dirt through a small mini high-banker to concentrate the material even more, we call this the end of the day clean up. After that about a gold pan of material is left to have to work, and that is what My mother and father in law are doing in this picture, they are also the ones that take care of most of the equipment construction, like the Wash plant, Trommel, High-Banker and Bunk House. We would not be able to mine without them.