Many gold miners wish they had this problem - figuring out what to do about the fine gold that's hidden in the black sand, one of the by-products of placer mining. Coarser gold is extracted from the sluiceboxes during the cleanup process, but there's always a mixture of black sand and fine gold left at the end. Some miners just send it all out to a lab for chemical processing, but others use a variety of methods to try to extract the remaining gold, including running the mixture through a spiral wheel to spin out the gold. The resulting gold is very fine and hard to do much with, so it's sometimes melted and made into bars. The melting pot is blasted with a propane torch to heat the gold close to its melting point of 1,065 C, which allows it to be poured off and worked into small gold bars. A pinch of borax is added to the mixture to help purify the gold and pour the nearly-molten metal out of the pot. This pot full was a good one - resulting in about 20 ounces of gold formed into bars at the end!
Another picture of the week brought to you by www.hollowaybar.com.
