Improving Gold Recovery Rates

Here are a few helpful hints from Ian Freeland, our resident expert on the Micron Mill Wave Table gold recovery device:

Some tips on improving gold recovery because the Wave Table is a good device for recovering gold from either “hard rock” or “alluvial” (placer) deposits.

Re. Hard Rock gold deposits

If gold is in hard rock, the ore has to be crushed and sufficiently milled fine, in other words ground down. You need to do this in order to free up the small gold particles. Consequently, it is important for small miners and prospectors to be able to crush and grind down their gold bearing ore, before they put over the Wave Table (WT). Otherwise the WT will not work at its optimum performance level.

So it’s a good idea if miners adopt the practice of using a jaw crusher and then a hammer mill (or ball mill etc) that will reduce the ore down to 100% passing 2mm or even 100% passing 1mm in size. This latter size is perfect for running on a WT.

Re. Alluvial/Placer deposits

Again I cannot stress enough the need to get your WT feed size down to 100% passing 2mm and even 1mm (for very fine gold areas). Any coarse gold can be collected with sluice boxes or gold traps which are very easy to set up. It is the fine gold that is difficult to recover — and that is where the WT comes in to play. BUT the feed to the wave table has to be screened (classified) down to a smaller and more manageable-size fraction.

So it is useful to consider the idea of rotating wet screens (we call them trommels), otherwise the wavetable will not operate effectively. Or you could use a wet vibrating screen.

Hope this helps.

Again, contact Ian with your questions – either by entering them in the comments section below, or hitting the Contact button near the top of the screen.