This post is dedicated to our chief mechanic, engineer, and welder extrodanar. We couldn’t do anything without his ingenuity an hard work. He designed and built our wash plant, grizzly, and whatever other hair brained inventions we come up with.
In this picture we see our hero working two days in the hot sun on a modification to the wash plant that we ended up removing due to safety consternation. Some days, we let him off the hook to go on a motorcycle ride, but not too often…
This year we have a new lineup on gold getting stuff. This includes a “new to us” John deer 1010 Dozer. The new bigger wash plant with a 12 ft long sluice. And a grizzly for taking out all those dangerous monster rocks.
This is our new wash plant at the gold mine set in place and ready to run. Grandma and Lyra are trying it out. We got about two half days of running in this first three day weekend, we ran into some hiccups but we were able to devise some work a rounds. I will talk about more of that later. Lets get to the Meat and potatoes, what you really came here to see GOLD, this lower picture is what we hauled out of the ground our first weekend there. It is just shy of quarter ounce of gold.
This is a sneak peak at our new, improved and bigger wash plant. The sun is out the snow is melting and soon you will be able to see some photos of this beast in action. As you have seen, if you have been following the blog, we have been up to the mine this winter. We have done some snow clearing to hurry along spring melt so we can set up our new equipment. Stay tuned for 2013 mining season news and photos, ITS ALMOST HERE!!!
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.