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Methods of Final Concentration
It really does not matter what type of method the weekend prospector uses to recover gold, in most cases he will usually not have a big amount of pure gold despite all the efforts put into it. When panning is done, the gold can be separated quite well from the black sand and the end result of that might be as high as 95 percent of the gold.
When sluicing is done however, the story is a little bit different. Remember that a great amount of gravel needs to be run over the riffles before the clean up is done on it. Even the best and well-organized sluicing operation will still accumulate a considerable amount of black sand mixed in with the gold. There is usually not a lot of time to concentrate this material more and it is in most cases cleaned out from the sluice and then stored in a glass or plastic container until it can be processed further.
All right, but what happens to all the fine gold? You know, the gold that is in teensy particles that are too small to be seen with the naked eye. It is very difficult to separate fine gold by normal methods. Even if a person is panning and think they might be making a perfect separation of the gold from the black sand, it is still a good idea to check the black sand under a magnifying glass to see if there are any teensy particles that have been left remaining. If you do notice there are, place all the black sand in another container and process it later on.
This kind of concentration is generally done after the panning and sluicing has been completed. There are a lot of people that take the black sands home with them to process because it is a space they are able to control better. The professional miners used to do this work in the evening after they had finished their searching in the daytime. Due to the fact that it was the last thing that was done after the day’s recovery it was called the final concentration. All it consists of is getting the last little bit of gold and getting rid of any foreign and unwanted material.
There are two things that are done in final concentration that consist of a mechanical kind of separation and the other is a chemical type of separation. The mechanical types of separation are the methods that are usually used first.
