Small Mining Operations

Starting small with quick profitability gives you a lot of financial elbow room plus real-world experience that can be used for final mill design.

You find yourself with a bucketful of concentrates that you have accumulated over the season and consider the logical next step: to reduce the bucket of cons to a gold bar. Where do you begin?

There are times when being able to recognize a type of rock can make you a much more successful prospector.

One of the issues that prospectors run into when working to upscale from micro-scale hard rock testing to a greater production output, is that they often confuse individual devices or machines with systems.

Since we’ve already covered the basics of permitting a “Notice Level” mining operation, it’s time to talk actual mining.

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...

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

The small-scale miner has reasonable opportunity to exploit some of these small, rich placer gold deposits. 

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.

May 18, 2019, after 26 years, I had finally saved enough money. I bought my one-way ticket to Fairbanks, Alaska, and I started off by finding a new job…

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.

I’ve been in enough mines to know better, and I mentally kicked myself several times. That was a close call…

For simplicity, I will assume that you wish to make enough profit so that you can comfortably pay your bills using just the profits from the mine.

They worked their plan, bit by bit, and sure enough, after the blast, gold was detected… Over two pounds of beautiful crystalline gold was recovered in that stretch!

…let’s dive in and take a closer look at these rich gold and silver-bearing minerals to find out what they are, where they form, and how to identify them.

Mining claimants who wish to retain their mining claims on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands through the 2021 assessment year must pay a maintenance fee or file a maintenance fee waiver certificate on or before September 1…

For the prospector, knowing what oxidized hydrothermal alteration looks like in the field is an important exploration tool.

…as an academic argument, when mated to the appropriate engine, is the pump really moving water at the rate of 400 GPM?