How To Recover Free Gold Wires Using A Shaking Table?

Today we’ve had a customer send us some incinerated IC chips which have been screened to 80 mesh minus, and we are going to run them on our small two foot by four foot shaking table.

Preperation Work

Add some dry jet to the mix and mix them with a paint stirrer which works great for mixing up this kind of material. Now the very fine ash material is working its way right down across the shaking table into the tailing trough. We have gone another bunch of material, once that black smoky light stuff is gone, some darker larger particles will come across, and then some silvery shiny particles will come across.

raw matterial and mixed material

The First Time of Gold Dressing

In the top groove, we have got the gold coming across, and it will end up under the water bar on the left-hand side of the table. This actually gives us a pretty good idea here. We have got a nice gold line right here under the water bar. The lower specific gravity material is getting washed down behind it into the next groove, into the next groove and into the safety groove, while the excess is pouring down into the concentrates or middlings trough. All of the high grade and some of the safety groove is coming off into the high-grade trough where we are going to capture, historically, 95% plus of the gold in that end trough.

Okay, we have stopped the shaking table, and you can see the striations again. Lots of nice gold on the far left of the table, it is coming out of the top groove. And as it comes across the top, the lower specific gravity material gets flushed down the table to the right, and the gold gets flushed, transported over to the left, under the water bar. The table keeps trying to push the gold to the left, and the water keeps trying to push the gold to the right, so it all concentrates right there in a line, and then down into the concentrates trough, that is the high grade trough.

the gold line on the shaking table

There is probably less than 3 gallons per minute to run this table. It doesn’t take very much. And in this scenario, it’d be really easy to circulate the water. There’s no bump in this table and no jerk in the table, so it’s a very smooth action. One of the features for catching fine gold is the grooves, another is the low slope of the table. We cut grooves into the rubber to reduce the turbulance on the tabletop and capture that really really dense material. The shaking table adopts a unique safety system device to automatically protect the equipment. The low-speed structure makes the shaking table run more smoothly. And the slope of the shaking table can be matched to the size of the current.

the shaking table

Then just the very gentle action of the table that moves everything over to the left. It’s a very gentle and smooth process, so you create as little turbulence as possible. There we go, and out of the bottom of the bucket, that’s where a lot of the gold was. So much gold there at the end, and we are filling up our top couple of grooves there. That is the thickest gold line we have seen. Much of the material, much of the gold had settled down to the bottom of the bucket. So it’s coming across, going into our high grade trough.

free gold wires got from shaking table

The Second Time——Collect the Remaining Gold Mines

Now after we are done emptying the bucket, we let the table run for a while. There’s still enough material that we need to brush down the grooves to get all the materials down to the proper troughs. So you can see all the gold pooled up at the end of that groove that gets swept out. And I’m sure there is some down in the groove below that. There at the end there was quite a bit of gold at the bottom of the bucket, so it overflowed the first couple grooves and actually ended up in the third, fourth or even fifth grooves. As you brush that across, you will be able to see it come out the end of the grooves and under the water bar.

brush the shaking table

Now we are going to pan out the number one high grade hole. And what we are finding is that whatever the black material was in here, it must be a pretty high specific gravity because the panning process isn’t separating the gold from the black material very well. It’s intermingled. We are able to separate to some extent, and we can concentrate it quite a lot. This is going to need a little bit of treatment to get the 24 karat gold out of it. We have found out the middlings and the concentrates hole now, and there is a little crescent in the crease of the pan there, and typically that’s about 5% of the total gold that comes off the table with the rest in the high grade hole.

Types of Hole	Proportion of the Total Gold
Middlings and Concentrates Hole	5%
High Grade Hole	95%

The Third Time——Collect Gold from Tailings

And now we have got a big blob of the tailings. I expect most of this is ash but I’m not sure. These are the panning results from the tailings, we panned about a third of the tailings and this is what we got. I think you can see it below. There is just a very very light dusting of the gold wire, very fine gold wire off the cips up there. And that’s way less than 1% of the total gold recovered from the table. There are a few things that we can try to change to recover this little bit of fine gold.

This shaking table had been set up for ore and so the slope may be a little bit too much. The water flow may have been a little too high. And the slurry mixture for the IC chips may have had not quite enough water, so it comes out as a big glob, and doesn’t have time to stratify on the table before it gets washed off, because of the slope and the water. So I think we can recover most of this fine gold that we lost in this first pass, with table tuning, but I thought I’d give you the full picture of how it went and the little bit of gold we lost. Again it’s way less than 1%. So the shaking table did a real good job of recovery.

gold processed from tailings

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