How To

There are three basic power sources for rock drills—electricity, gasoline and compressed air. Before we go into big pneumatic drills, we’ll start with a quick rundown of each.

In this article I am going to talk about the different sources of gold and the clues a prospector can follow to find the source.

It rained over four inches that night and the creek flooded both my backyard and my workshop. When I opened the door to my workshop Christmas morning, an unwelcome sight greeted me.

Fast forward to present day and the XRF has come of age. Pull the trigger on the hand-held device and you get a nearly instant assay of the surface of a rock.

Every year I go through this and every year it becomes more difficult to find new territory that is available for us to prospect. Is there anywhere that hasn’t been worked?

Imagine you have located a source of virgin placer ore containing immense gold value. Now imagine that there is a 10-ton monolith of extremely hard gneiss in between you and payday.

…there is an easy way to create a reasonably accurate map without any fancy instruments.

Whether you are placer or hard rock gold mining, maximizing the efficiency of your recovery process is very important to success, and accurate testing is necessary to do so.

After paying for the mine fleet, mill capital, supplies, fuel, power and labor, at today’s metal prices, does this mine make a profit?

Rivers are not just random and accidental; streams and other drainages are what they are because of the forces of erosion acting on the bedrock.

With the recent surge of interest in gold projects, it’s about time to revisit a subject that strikes fear into the hearts of small-scale miners: Permits.

There is a material processing principle widely used in large milling operations to improve recovery that is poorly understood by most of the micro-mining and prospecting community...

After a short time, the tailings pile can get very large, and can actually block the downstream end of the sluice box.

Fortunately, there are products on the market that can address these problems and make a small-scale mining operation feasible.

They… create negligible fumes and much less fly rock than blasting. Below are some tips on maximizing your effectiveness with these tools.

I’ve been following the precious metals for decades, and I haven’t seen a move this powerful in many years.

Let’s set up a thought experiment: Suppose you had some material that ran one ounce per ton gold, which is generally considered high grade to fantastic grade depending on the circumstances.

How big is the deposit? Are there boulders you will need to move? Do you just want to recover the nuggets or do you think there is good fine gold that you will also want to capture?

From this I inferred that engine 2 had a carburetor problem. In this article, I discuss the specific engine/carburetor problem, and the surprising solution to this problem.

When detecting an area that has been cleaned to bedrock and you have new trees growing, always make sure you get your coil as close as possible to the tree. Why?