Very much looking forward to a new smelting video from you, and roasting your cons to release the gold - it would be super interesting to take a sample and split it in 3 or more, to figure out how much gold is held up in the Tellurides vs other sulfides and to see how much is liberated using the different methods
Telluride is a gold, and silver ore. Calavarite contains gold, sylvanite, silver. Cripple Creek is famous for this, specimens are highly sought after. They occur in in California gold rush country, and other areas of the world but are rare it is one of the only times gold alloys with other metals.
Calaverite (cal-uh-verite) was named after the wonderfully rich mines of Calaveras county, California. Be careful when roasting as the chemical bond between the AU and the tellerium can cause the finely disseminated gold to volatize. Also be careful when assaying as this chemical bond can cause up to 40 percent of the gold to be absorbed into the cupel. The telluride ores of California and Colorado were often measured in pounds, not ounces per ton. Keep following those telluride bands, i hope you find a ton or two!
In your calculation at 41:00, since you're assuming everything is one or the other, x+y=1, so you can replace y with (1-x), for a direct calculation without guessing and checking.
Can't help you with the technical aspect, but I have about a hundred Tidy Cat pales that I will be willing to give you if you want. Already mentioned them to Harry. My thought is that he can stop by on his way north to your mine. I am in southern Oregon, Just off the 5 on Hwy 99 (the frontage road to the 5) Off at the 35, back on at the 40, easy peasy ... Let me know, if not I will put them out front for free, but if they can help you .... Pales and lids, take what you want....Enjoyed your video as always, thankx for the share.... ~Jekyll the Hyde 🎩
You need a diamond cutting wheel on an angle grinder and/or on a 4-5" dewalt or other battery powered circular saw to cut out samples with. A lot faster than the hammer drill. As for the quartz and tellurides; grind it, run across the table, roast the hell out of the #1 and #2 in the furnace, then smelt at higher temps.
Hey Jason, Get well! We all want to see you pour gold bars and the whole process! This video was awesome! Love it when you decide to 'experiment'!! Thumbs up! Get better real soon! Thumbs up! Jim
Have you done any experimenting on electrolytic separation of minerals? I find your enthusiasm for the hunt for minerals wonderfully engaging. Keep it up.
Jason, I'm not metallurgist, but I did look up the melting points of Sulphur & Tellurium, which are related and they are both well below gold, so I think your supposition that there is gold locked up in the Tellurium is spot on. Of course Tellurium in itself might, don't know it value, just be worth something in itself, but in your case if gold is locked up in it, then I would sacrifice it for the gold. Just looked up price of Te, it's going for 2.55/oz., not a lot considering they say it's rarer than gold.
I kept hearing him talk about Tellurides in so many episodes that I finally googled it. Says $45/oz and it's got a lot of uses but I don't know what someone would have to do to separate and purify it. Sounds like something for a chemical refiner channel.
i dont know why, but i just want to take a vacuum to an area of the mine and see what gold you get. i know beggars cant be choosers but id love to see like 20 bags go through the shaker table. the shaker table is amazing. love it have a great weekend!
Hmmmm, now I have to figure out a furnace to roast some of my samples in! That's cool! What a fun pocket to come across. I hope the fuxtix stay out this year.
Boiling and hot sodium hydroxide is absolutely terrifying from a safety perspective. I use it in the metallurgy industry for processing some ores and it is always my least favourite process. Well, aside from HF stuff.
great video as always, keep them coming. one suggestion, your videos are mono (right channel only) with usual scratch sounds on the left channel, maybe while editing get the right channel and copy it over the left audio channel and that way it will improve the audio of your videos drastically...
Use oxalic acid to remove the iron oxide staining, far safer. Playing with the caustic chemicals is fairly hazardous and don't contemplate using hydrofluoric, a drop on your skin will kill you, we used to etch our specimens by exposing the specimen just to the vapour (in a fume hood). Quenching your hot specimens will shatter the quartz, as they did. Very nice mineral specimens.
Hey Jason that’s some great looking ore. GREAT JOB!!! Would you roast half of that stuff. Maybe the less cool looking samples. Then let’s compare the roasted vs the rest. Keep it up we love your videos. I have learned a ton from watching your channel. Thanks and happy holidays.
I think you need to go in with a diamond saw to create relief. Not sure of the logistics on a wall like that but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.
Calaverite = AuTe2. Krennerite = Au3AgTe8. This could affect your assumptions about weight and the ratio of Au to other metals. Still, I agree the real value here is in specimens-very cool!
And I would be running back to that mine to fill some bags and start grinding and smelting!! I look forward to you doing an assay of that wall section.
Jason, what you should get as PPE is a PAPR setup. I wear one all day at work and they are amazing, and leave your face visible and make you much easier to understand expensive as fuck, like oh my lord, but also totally worth it and i don't even make content. You also look and feel like a spaceman
Jason, you need to have me teach you how to dowse the precious metal veins and ore shoots in your mine. This is no bullshit physics that are the same physics that energizes the alarm on electronic metal detectors. In the 1970's my father and I reverse engineered the physics involved in dowsing and invented the modern light weight ball bearing dowsing rod for using dowsing physics in locating our old core-drill on the exact center of gold and silver veins that are buried under 200 feet of glacier rock and till, which worked out perfectly for us. I wrote the book to teach the world how to apply physics in dowsing. My book: The Art of Dowsing - Separating Science from Superstition ($14.95), by Michael Fercik, explains all the physics involved in dowsing and teaches how to build the modern light weight ball bearing dowsing rod, which is the only dowsing rod that accurately gauges the element being dowsed by pitting the energy of gravity against the energizing of the pure one-tenth ounce dowsing rod load that is tapped onto the ELEVATED acetylene welding rod that is free spinning on ball bearings. This precisely gauges the dowsing of all edges, exact center, depth buried with angle of deposition, and most important is grading or deciphering the amount of the dowsed element that is contained in the elemental mass that is being dowsed. Anybody can become a professional dowser by practicing and mastering my book's dowsing lessons. I hope dowsing enriches your life intellectually and financially.
A word of caution, mix the hydroxide with the water cold, it heats up as it dissolves and can cause it to boil and splatter all over, even shoot out like a fountain. After mixed, then you can heat it.
I was wondering about all the Tellurides you kept talking about and whether there was gold in it. Chris Ralph has a great video on gold bearing Tellurides on his channel. Makes me wonder about all the ore you have in the muck pile, lol. I say roast 'em all and get the gold unless the Telluride specimen is spectacular. Hope you get to feeling better soon!
Hey Jason, I’m a big fan. I have an idea. My brother in law. Is a core cutter. Can you use a diamond core cutter to first cut a core then break it out , then you can break the quarts into the core hole. This is the way they do it in construction. My in-law does this all the time. Just an idea. You probably would’ve already tried this or discounted it. Once you have a void or a series’s of core holes maybe feather a wedge it out. Anyhow thanks for the great content!
I know it’s more profitable selling specimens but I for one would love to see some of this refined to see what you have. Hell just a couple buckets of what can be shoveled off the floor would mark an interesting video.
Your results make me think that maybe you should be roasting the high grade before grinding and putting it on the shaker table. If the teluride is mixed with the gold, wouldn't that change the density? And if they are bound, might they not collect properly on the shaker table? Maybe you'd increase your yield if you baked the ore first before grinding.
Try a mini blaster - so you can more 'control' the blasting amount / where you blast and what you remove. You can then blast around the rich bits and then maybe remove it with the hand tools.
Bars you say! I hope you’ll be adding the tellurides to the smelt, not just the free milled gold. Perhaps you could do separate smelts, one just gold, one just tellurides? I’m betting on the tellurides😀
Should you use the sodium hydroxide instead of roasting the ore, or should you use the two in combination? A tidbit of history. When Hannibal was crossing the Alps into Italy, he encountered a large quartz formation that was blocking part of the pass. So his army heated a lot of sodium hydroxide solution, and they sprayed and poured it over the rock. They dissolved enough to be able to break up the rest of it by hand. The Romans used this technique in mining operations.
My opinion on weather to roast those samples or leave them would be if they show gold and are cool specimens then leave them alone. If they are not that interesting roast them to bring out the gold!
15:34 Did you notice the letter C show up on the face of the rock? It wasn't there before you heated it for a long time. I bet that is more telluride inside the rock trying to cook off. Your ore is obviously richer than you thought. You should make sure to catch the tellurides on your shaker table and roast them. As for selling specimens on eBay, maybe you want to really rethink how much gold you're letting go of, and whether it is more important at this stage to recover all you can to fund your mine. There will be more in the future. You might be able to directly cupel the telluride cons. Your math for the krennerite looked good to me.
The visible gold is so cool to see. Why not drape the tarp from the back of the mine to catch anything that shatters as you’re chipping at it. I think you should leave some of the more interesting samples as is without roasting them.
so jason when you crush your ore and smelt what happens to the tellurides does the gold end up in your final button... or does it have to be roasted first to release to release the gold...then smelt?
Haters who "hate" who have a HS diploma? ..go away. Do you own a gold mine? No. But Jason does. Shut it. He does these vids for educational purposes and doesn't need your HS education to tell him what to do.. keep it going Jason.. ignore the people with no knowledge of what they are spouting....lol
remember that seam is under enormous pressure , so getting pieces out will be almost impossible, probably cut away a bit of footwall and spread into that
Very much looking forward to a new smelting video from you, and roasting your cons to release the gold - it would be super interesting to take a sample and split it in 3 or more, to figure out how much gold is held up in the Tellurides vs other sulfides and to see how much is liberated using the different methods
Telluride is a gold, and silver ore. Calavarite contains gold, sylvanite, silver. Cripple Creek is famous for this, specimens are highly sought after. They occur in in California gold rush country, and other areas of the world but are rare it is one of the only times gold alloys with other metals.
Incredible calaverite crystals!
Woohoo! Love an early Saturday mining video, thanks Jason! ⛏️
Calaverite (cal-uh-verite) was named after the wonderfully rich mines of Calaveras county, California.
Be careful when roasting as the chemical bond between the AU and the tellerium can cause the finely disseminated gold to volatize.
Also be careful when assaying as this chemical bond can cause up to 40 percent of the gold to be absorbed into the cupel.
The telluride ores of California and Colorado were often measured in pounds, not ounces per ton.
Keep following those telluride bands, i hope you find a ton or two!
In your calculation at 41:00, since you're assuming everything is one or the other, x+y=1, so you can replace y with (1-x), for a direct calculation without guessing and checking.
Can't help you with the technical aspect, but I have about a hundred Tidy Cat pales that I will be willing to give you if you want. Already mentioned them to Harry. My thought is that he can stop by on his way north to your mine. I am in southern Oregon, Just off the 5 on Hwy 99 (the frontage road to the 5) Off at the 35, back on at the 40, easy peasy ... Let me know, if not I will put them out front for free, but if they can help you .... Pales and lids, take what you want....Enjoyed your video as always, thankx for the share.... ~Jekyll the Hyde 🎩
This was awesome to be a witness off. The way the gold revealed it self was beautiful to see.
You need a diamond cutting wheel on an angle grinder and/or on a 4-5" dewalt or other battery powered circular saw to cut out samples with. A lot faster than the hammer drill. As for the quartz and tellurides; grind it, run across the table, roast the hell out of the #1 and #2 in the furnace, then smelt at higher temps.
love the shoutout to vogus prospecting, i love his videos
You could also talk to Mike from Gold sales and see what he suggests as far as removing the courts
Imagine the amount of gold still on the floor of this gold mine.
Id vaccuum it all up, better yet id get my old lady to do it, I'll do the panning
In case you missed it Jason had a guest on who actually worked this mine in the past. They used a sluice and ran everything from the floor through it.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
@CFarnwide actually he flooded it and was going to dredge. But he didn't.
@@CFarnwide they wanted to but never actually got the chance
You should get yourself a set of feather and wedges so you can drill and knock out nicer square chunks
Congratulations Jason, got to be really exciting having your own mine. Stay golden and grand sharing.✌️💪👊🇺🇸⚒️⚒️⚒️⚒️⚒️
Hey mbmm family... we need to get jason an xrf!
Hydrofluoric acid will create the specimens you're looking for.
Roast It! When I was in the 6th, my teacher told us about your Orr. That was in Colorado more than 55 years ago. ROAST It!
For safety reasons add sodium hydroxide to cold water and heat it up afterwards. It will heat up the water anyway.
Got that right.
wow look at that visible gold with tellurides and galena! absolutely stunning material!
Cooking with Jason 😂 29:00
Would be interesting to see you smelt out those tellurides. Or maybe soak them and oxidize them out first?
Hey Jason, Get well! We all want to see you pour gold bars and the whole process! This video was awesome! Love it when you decide to 'experiment'!! Thumbs up! Get better real soon! Thumbs up! Jim
Have you done any experimenting on electrolytic separation of minerals? I find your enthusiasm for the hunt for minerals wonderfully engaging. Keep it up.
Your number 2 on your shaker table should be awesome.
Jason, I'm not metallurgist, but I did look up the melting points of Sulphur & Tellurium, which are related and they are both well below gold, so I think your supposition that there is gold locked up in the Tellurium is spot on. Of course Tellurium in itself might, don't know it value, just be worth something in itself, but in your case if gold is locked up in it, then I would sacrifice it for the gold. Just looked up price of Te, it's going for 2.55/oz., not a lot considering they say it's rarer than gold.
I kept hearing him talk about Tellurides in so many episodes that I finally googled it. Says $45/oz and it's got a lot of uses but I don't know what someone would have to do to separate and purify it. Sounds like something for a chemical refiner channel.
Merry Christmas!
Very impressive... Great find.
Can't wait for the next video
I would suggest drilling and blasting over tapping.
I hope your whole mine produces like your 2 ounce sample. Very interesting, thank you.
i dont know why, but i just want to take a vacuum to an area of the mine and see what gold you get. i know beggars cant be choosers but id love to see like 20 bags go through the shaker table. the shaker table is amazing. love it have a great weekend!
Hmmmm, now I have to figure out a furnace to roast some of my samples in! That's cool! What a fun pocket to come across. I hope the fuxtix stay out this year.
Excellent specimens
Awesome video. Interesting to watch all the different methods of trying to figure out exactly what minerals these rock are made of. Fun stuff.
Boiling and hot sodium hydroxide is absolutely terrifying from a safety perspective.
I use it in the metallurgy industry for processing some ores and it is always my least favourite process.
Well, aside from HF stuff.
Oh man, congratulations... you strok it rich! The American dream!
When I do the math, we'll have a new Goldrush in the next few years.
great video as always, keep them coming. one suggestion, your videos are mono (right channel only) with usual scratch sounds on the left channel, maybe while editing get the right channel and copy it over the left audio channel and that way it will improve the audio of your videos drastically...
Holy cow! Wish I had one of those furnaces to check out some of my own.
Use oxalic acid to remove the iron oxide staining, far safer. Playing with the caustic chemicals is fairly hazardous and don't contemplate using hydrofluoric, a drop on your skin will kill you, we used to etch our specimens by exposing the specimen just to the vapour (in a fume hood). Quenching your hot specimens will shatter the quartz, as they did. Very nice mineral specimens.
Hey Jason that’s some great looking ore. GREAT JOB!!! Would you roast half of that stuff. Maybe the less cool looking samples. Then let’s compare the roasted vs the rest. Keep it up we love your videos. I have learned a ton from watching your channel. Thanks and happy holidays.
I think you need to go in with a diamond saw to create relief.
Not sure of the logistics on a wall like that but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.
i wored masonry and one of those portable diamond saws would cut 4 inches deep and you could cut long rectangles out of the rock in very little time.
Calaverite = AuTe2. Krennerite = Au3AgTe8. This could affect your assumptions about weight and the ratio of Au to other metals. Still, I agree the real value here is in specimens-very cool!
You guys are so fun to listen to
Start cookin' and have a beer. Gold is nice.
I’ e been to Telluride, CO. I was for winter sports clinic for disabled and blind veterans. Had a wonderful time. Many years ago.😊
18:40 great specimen piece, just like it is. I would buy it.
Yes! Do lots of experiments!!!
And I would be running back to that mine to fill some bags and start grinding and smelting!! I look forward to you doing an assay of that wall section.
Jason. I hammer drilled 10 holes around 2 inches apart in a diamond pattern and 8 inch deep. Then was able to get big sections out in a short time.
Jason, what you should get as PPE is a PAPR setup. I wear one all day at work and they are amazing, and leave your face visible and make you much easier to understand
expensive as fuck, like oh my lord, but also totally worth it and i don't even make content.
You also look and feel like a spaceman
Jason, you need to have me teach you how to dowse the precious metal veins and ore shoots in your mine. This is no bullshit physics that are the same physics that energizes the alarm on electronic metal detectors. In the 1970's my father and I reverse engineered the physics involved in dowsing and invented the modern light weight ball bearing dowsing rod for using dowsing physics in locating our old core-drill on the exact center of gold and silver veins that are buried under 200 feet of glacier rock and till, which worked out perfectly for us. I wrote the book to teach the world how to apply physics in dowsing. My book: The Art of Dowsing - Separating Science from Superstition ($14.95), by Michael Fercik, explains all the physics involved in dowsing and teaches how to build the modern light weight ball bearing dowsing rod, which is the only dowsing rod that accurately gauges the element being dowsed by pitting the energy of gravity against the energizing of the pure one-tenth ounce dowsing rod load that is tapped onto the ELEVATED acetylene welding rod that is free spinning on ball bearings. This precisely gauges the dowsing of all edges, exact center, depth buried with angle of deposition, and most important is grading or deciphering the amount of the dowsed element that is contained in the elemental mass that is being dowsed. Anybody can become a professional dowser by practicing and mastering my book's dowsing lessons. I hope dowsing enriches your life intellectually and financially.
You need a big Grain Vac to vac the Gold off the Floor 😂😂😂😂😂
Fun video Jason. ❤ learning and discovering along wth u! Whatever u do will b beneficial. Knowledge and wisdom.
7:18 that is the best part of gold it shines in the dark
I'm so interested in this, Jason! You do an excellent video. Thank you.
A word of caution, mix the hydroxide with the water cold, it heats up as it dissolves and can cause it to boil and splatter all over, even shoot out like a fountain. After mixed, then you can heat it.
13:51 looks good congratulations on the find
I was wondering about all the Tellurides you kept talking about and whether there was gold in it. Chris Ralph has a great video on gold bearing Tellurides on his channel. Makes me wonder about all the ore you have in the muck pile, lol. I say roast 'em all and get the gold unless the Telluride specimen is spectacular. Hope you get to feeling better soon!
Get well Jason !! Bronchitis sucks….
Hey Jason,
I’m a big fan. I have an idea. My brother in law. Is a core cutter. Can you use a diamond core cutter to first cut a core then break it out , then you can break the quarts into the core hole. This is the way they do it in construction. My in-law does this all the time. Just an idea. You probably would’ve already tried this or discounted it. Once you have a void or a series’s of core holes maybe feather a wedge it out. Anyhow thanks for the great content!
heck yeah new upload!
about 18:50 '; the wire gold/telluride sample, I think you should soak the opposite end in Hydrofluoric acid, but leave the wire out.
I know it’s more profitable selling specimens but I for one would love to see some of this refined to see what you have. Hell just a couple buckets of what can be shoveled off the floor would mark an interesting video.
should do a test smelt on the Tellurides
We want to see the gold!
Heat that proud piece and see the gold
Good numbers Jason 👍
Your results make me think that maybe you should be roasting the high grade before grinding and putting it on the shaker table. If the teluride is mixed with the gold, wouldn't that change the density? And if they are bound, might they not collect properly on the shaker table? Maybe you'd increase your yield if you baked the ore first before grinding.
33:40 you should weigh the calaverite before and after putting it in furnace.
Maybe you could encase some of the tiny crystals in lucite.
Try a mini blaster - so you can more 'control' the blasting amount / where you blast and what you remove. You can then blast around the rich bits and then maybe remove it with the hand tools.
Are you saving the possible gold telluride powder from the shaker table? Should be able to dissolve with aqua regia and precipitate out the gold.
Howdy, Jason have you tried using a diamond hole saw in your rotary hammer drill on those larger Telaride chunks? cutting them out as a core plug.
Bars you say! I hope you’ll be adding the tellurides to the smelt, not just the free milled gold. Perhaps you could do separate smelts, one just gold, one just tellurides? I’m betting on the tellurides😀
Game changer, now do you get a big oven and start cooking your ore?
I take specimens of the uncut rock, slab, etched on quartz and free etched.
No roast for me, just well cooked.
I think adding a snuffer bottle to the tool kit and pocket those pickers separately as you go might be smart move.
What is that green fluid in the bottom of your dish?
Should you use the sodium hydroxide instead of roasting the ore, or should you use the two in combination?
A tidbit of history. When Hannibal was crossing the Alps into Italy, he encountered a large quartz formation that was blocking part of the pass. So his army heated a lot of sodium hydroxide solution, and they sprayed and poured it over the rock. They dissolved enough to be able to break up the rest of it by hand. The Romans used this technique in mining operations.
My opinion on weather to roast those samples or leave them would be if they show gold and are cool specimens then leave them alone. If they are not that interesting roast them to bring out the gold!
15:34 Did you notice the letter C show up on the face of the rock? It wasn't there before you heated it for a long time. I bet that is more telluride inside the rock trying to cook off. Your ore is obviously richer than you thought. You should make sure to catch the tellurides on your shaker table and roast them. As for selling specimens on eBay, maybe you want to really rethink how much gold you're letting go of, and whether it is more important at this stage to recover all you can to fund your mine. There will be more in the future. You might be able to directly cupel the telluride cons. Your math for the krennerite looked good to me.
Of course you want to roast them, Jason.
The visible gold is so cool to see. Why not drape the tarp from the back of the mine to catch anything that shatters as you’re chipping at it.
I think you should leave some of the more interesting samples as is without roasting them.
Only one way to find out if its gold or not, ROAST IT.
so jason when you crush your ore and smelt what happens to the tellurides does the gold end up in your final button... or does it have to be roasted first to release to release the gold...then smelt?
There is 5.97g of tellurite -> 2.5677 g of gold
Do you recover Tellurium or does it just end up with the slag or in that little ceramic thing that absorbs base metals?
That one specimen is really nice and rare. Personally I would want 4X the melt if it were mine. Mine lol....
I heard that pyrite is a precious metal that is gaining value.
Haters who "hate" who have a HS diploma? ..go away. Do you own a gold mine? No. But Jason does. Shut it. He does these vids for educational purposes and doesn't need your HS education to tell him what to do.. keep it going Jason.. ignore the people with no knowledge of what they are spouting....lol
remember that seam is under enormous pressure , so getting pieces out will be almost impossible, probably cut away a bit of footwall and spread into that
I'd like to see those specimens under a lil magnification
It would be cool to see a collaboration with Niles Red for some of the chemistry stuff.
Try a torch to test if you can control the transformation from tellurides to gold.
I'm curious, have you found any nuggets?
Please roast them all😊
Perhaps you may have some platinum in there
Hi, What was the weight or specific gravity of the calaverite you melted @35:00?
It was right there in the dish next to the scale! lol
You should boil the piece you baked the tellurium out of, all those pockets would probably help it break down
Jeff Williams has done a video talking about Telluride ores being some of the richest. I'd get on the blower to Jeff