Mercury in Gold Concentrates

The mercury is used to pick up the grains of gold in the concentrate and carry them together .A heavy gold combination is bent which can be divided from the impurities by gravity. If particles of gold are to be alloyed with mercury, they must be clean and free of any face scale rust or build up. These clean gold particles must then be carefully mixed with the quicksilver .To guarantee this equipment called an amalgamator is used. It consists of a cast steel bowl ,about 10 inch in distance and 6 inches deep ,a cast steel shoe or mauler fits into this bowl .The shoe turn and successfully grinds and cleans up the gold when it is added to the bowl .When mercury is added the shoe carefully mixed the gold and mercury .Amalgamator such as this have been used for a hundred of years .And cruder types for some thousand years ,and are still the most successful type to use .This is since such devices guarantee they will not flour the quicksilver.

“Flouring” the quicksilver only means that the liquid mercury happen to be divided into many small drops which become isolated during the concentrate and are most hard to get back together ,particularly after they become loaded. Full quicksilver is that which has picked up gold .As the gold is picked up the quicksilver drops fluid natural and becomes stiff. If the quicksilver is floured or spread during the concentrate ,and loaded it difficult to gather all of the small mixture particles and bring them mutually .Except these particles are get together ,no effective division of the gold mixture from the rest of the material in the concentrate can happen.