New DRY jig (waterless)

[Idaho Jim 238]

Interesting equipment, but right now I'm into this dry thing. Lots of dry areas in southern Idaho, Montana, and western Wyoming. This dry jig, or it's offshoots, may become my "go-to" piece of equipment. No water to mess with, no pumps, just the 12v motor, and the small motor on the auto-feeder.....nice and quiet, which I really like when outdoors. I've already got new ideas on improvements floating around in my head.

Most of these dry areas, back in the day, were never adequately prospected, due to lack of water....there were better places to go. So, they may be a good place to look into now that I have the equipment to do it. This thing recovering that extremely fine tungsten makes me think it may recover even flour gold.

The wind has been howling for the last 2 days, including this morning, so I put off my local trip until tomorrow. I hope everything stays dry for another week or so. Will report back.

Jim

[Idaho Jim 238]

Well I went out yesterday. There's a place called Bonanza Bar on the Snake River downstream of American Falls. During the Bonneville breakout flood when the lake drained away (it's now the Great Salt Lake), the river couldn't handle all the water, so new channels, above the existing channel, were cut. Where the water came back into the main channel is where BB is located. I started out about a mile back from the river in the old dry channel. I ran about 40 gallons of mostly blow sand thru the jig, and got zero gold, but did get some magnetic black sand. I then went down to Bonanza Bar and located one of the old placers. There were tailing piles of mostly dirt, but a few of gravel, so I ran 10 gallons of the sand I classified from the gravels. I ran the gravel over a 10 mesh classifer screen.

Ended up with 8 very tiny flakes of flour gold, so I was happy with the results....the dry jig can recover flour gold. I also found out that Karl Von Mueller was right when he said you shouldn't keep the jig running once out of new material to put in. He claimed the jig would kick out the gold, which I doubted, but he was right. I ran the jig until nothing else would come out, saving that material, as well as the super cons that were left in the jig. Both cons had flakes, though the super con flakes were slightly larger. All the flakes would have easily gone through a 100 mesh screen, IMHO. In the old days,,they claimed it took 1500 of these flakes to make a pennyweight....they're really small.

Jim

Edited October 13, 2015 by Idaho Jim

[Hoser John 1,240]

OL' KVM was one smart fella for sure. His never ending preoccupation with making equipment "just a little bit better in recovery" was his passion. RIP as a real miner-John