Small Mining Operations

…to see the huge differences between the gold production amounts of the Western States, let’s look at the gold production—both hard rock and placer—of these 13 states up to the present.

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?

Prospectors often wonder why gold deposits in veins like it does. Why is one vein rich while another is barren, even though they are only a few hundred feet apart?

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!