How To

The water instantly dropped though the screen, leaving a pile of mud behind! I was so excited that I replaced it with a 150-mesh screen, and the same thing happened!

First, I look for smaller exploration companies that appear to be on the right track or that have started producing precious metals and are able to do so at a low cost per ounce.

This new map-based tool is far superior to the old version with lots of potential layers and information that a prospector can use in research.

The right ground balance setting for the conditions you are working is critical. If your detector isn’t set properly, you will lose depth of detection, sometimes to an extreme degree.

The right speed accumulates only the heavy materials and allows all of the lighter stuff to flow through. This optimum speed is dependent on the size of the gravel you need to move through the system.

Prospectors deal with black sands in lots of different ways. I know that some prospectors worry about getting every speck of gold and save black sands in buckets until they have hundreds of pounds.

The process we will be using is called “blockholing,” and it is commonly used at mines and in construction projects to break up oversize material into sizes that can be easily handled.

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.