We were up there a couple of weeks ago, and we talked to a guy who had a couple of grams for his day’s work. That’s like around $100, nothing to sneeze at. I was skeptical, but after seeing that, I am pretty gung ho.
We were pretty clueless, using kitchenware to pan, and I could SEE gold floating in the water. Now I know that the grease on the pan and my stupid fingers was suspending it. Well, we have done some research, bought a proper pan from Keene out in Chatsworth, and my improvised sluice shows promise.
So, any dopers want to give some advice or swap stories?
What, you’ve got a problem wit dat? The real questions are, how often does he go to th’ Ren Faire, and how many of his old flames have had sex changes? Has he ever lived on a boat?
Where did you pan? Like I said, the guy we met up in the East Fork had a decent catch for the day. Nothing to get rich on, but definitely worth his time.
Thanks to this thread I just educated myself on the legalities of panning for gold on public land and struck a motherload of useless trivia that just pushed something important out of my brain.
So, did you learn anything? People do it all the time up on the East Fork, the Ranger even told us where to go. Seems legal to me, seeing as there are folks that camp up there and make a living at it. Nice people, too.
Actually, gold is oleophilic, that means it sticks to grease. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that Jason’s Golden Fleece was an actual fleece that was put at the end of an ancient sluice, and the gold particles would then adhere to the natural oils in the wool.
I am jealous of your life, making six thousand posts here since March of last year, if your profile is to be believed. You must be tearing up the singles bars! :rolleyes:
Basically it varies state to state but it appears that panning on public land does not require a license. However claims still need to be researched and followed and you can’t work a claim without permission.
My understanding is that anyone is free to pan up on the East Fork, and that nobody can stake a claim. That being said, there is an informal etiquette that if someone is working an area, you should find your own spot. When we went up a couple of weeks ago, the guy who had recovered what he estimated and sure looked like two grams said we were welcome to dig in his hole. It makes sense, with both of us working the hole, we would get deeper faster and it would be to our mutual benefit, as presumably the ore would be richer farther down.
We have had some hellacious rains here, so more ore has now washed down from the seams. Can’t wait to get up there!!!
I’m not sure how panning for gold works, but in flotation the organic flotation agent causes the gold to rise to the surface with the air bubbles. If I had to guess what was happening I would say that either the gold didn’t have enough time to settle and contact the oil, or that the oil was light and coated the particles reducing the density of the particle.
I did a little math to look for buoyancy effects. I used 1E-7 m for the thickness of oil from this website just for a ball park figure. With SG gold = 19.3, and SG oil = 0.92, I found that the gold particle would need to have a diameter (assuming spherical) of about 2e-8 m to have a specific gravity approximately equal to 1. This is very small, and you wouldn’t be able to see the individual particles - it would look like a red liquid.
I ran through the math again assuming a cylindrical particle (ie a flake) with a thickness of 1E-7 m (from this site: Thickness of Gold Leaf - The Physics Factbook), and the gold would still need a radius of about 2e-8 m. I tried a gold flake thickness of 1e-8 m and that only increased the radius to 5e-8 m. I was expecting a much larger radius for a gold flake because there is more surface area on a flake than on a sphere; however the particles are so small that the geometry may not make much of a difference: for a flake thickness of 1e-7 m SG of a 1.00e-8 diameter flake equaled 1.09, and for the sphere (same diameter) the SG was 1.00. I don’t think flakes of gold would float, but I’m not going to stand by my math.
The big problem with the math is that the thickness of the oil film is similar to the particle size; however, this error (corrected by decreasing the thickness of the oil film) would tend to decrease the gold diameter. Decreasing the gold diameter provides more surface area for oil. But the SG of gold is 20X that of oil, I’m not sure that there is any case with macroscopic particles where enough oil adhered to the gold can cause the gold to settle slowly. I don’t particularly feel like going through and checking all of my assumptions. The second big problem is that macroscopic flakes could settle slowly independently of any oil film due to the large surface area creating drag. I’ve been under utilized at work lately; I think I will look at this some more tomorrow: It will look like I am working (I’m a new ChemE, and my firm has been promising to put me on some gold projects, but so far I’ve been sitting on my thumbs).
I want to think about this some more, but I think hydraulic concerns are preventing the gold from settling, not necessarily the oil.
You should try putting a greasy cloth on the last riffle of your sluice. If you can burn it cleanly enough to get rid of all the ash, you might recover a little more gold.
I’ve seen a demonstration of gold-panning in Australia, at Sovereign Hill, and my understanding is that gold goes the bottom of the pan, and the process involves using the water to wash the lighter sand and gravel out of the pan, leaving the gold in the pan. I don’t really understand how bubbles would be more likely to adhere to gold than, e.g., to quartz, which would be a major component of the sand.
Weren’t satisfied by your first response to my post? And I like how you try to call an end to the snark just before re-responding with some of your own. I think I struck a nerve!
