Is there gold on the other side of the mine

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Hi all i found a mine still got gold the sdc cant pick it up but the falcon m20 can iv crushed some and panned ots got gold. I want to sample some spot and send in for an assay. My question in this drive the old timers have stopped up from the drive. Would there be any ore or gold on the down side?
 
ben2363 said:
Hi all i found a mine still got gold the sdc cant pick it up but the falcon m20 can iv crushed some and panned ots got gold. I want to sample some spot and send in for an assay. My question in this drive the old timers have stopped up from the drive. Would there be any ore or gold on the down side?

There possibly is, but usual underground gold mining procedure is to mine upwards into ore, with broken rock then easily scooped up from the surface of the drive and removed for treatment. Mining downwards would slow progress and also make ore handling more difficult.
 
grubstake said:
ben2363 said:
Hi all i found a mine still got gold the sdc cant pick it up but the falcon m20 can iv crushed some and panned ots got gold. I want to sample some spot and send in for an assay. My question in this drive the old timers have stopped up from the drive. Would there be any ore or gold on the down side?

There possibly is, but usual underground gold mining procedure is to mine upwards into ore, with broken rock then easily scooped up from the surface of the drive and removed for treatment. Mining downwards would slow progress and also make ore handling more difficult.
Depends on mine layout. For example in the Victorian mountains, common to drive an adit and then stope from surface down to the adit.
 
They stope up from the adit nothing on the surface. Looks like the reef is on a 60 ish degree angle so there stoped up but nothing down
 
ben2363 said:
They stope up from the adit nothing on the surface. Looks like the reef is on a 60 ish degree angle so there stoped up but nothing down
In which case there is often gold still in the floor. Because it would require sinking winzes to get at it, or driving a lower adit, it was sometimes never developed.
 
About a long time ago (25 odd yrs :( ) I helped a couple of local old boys close up a mine in the north east vic mountains after their MRC had expired. The mine consisted of an eastern heading crosscut Adit about 150 ft long that cut a NNW lode about 10inches wide. The old boys had taken out one crushing of about 9 tons from the northern face. They ran this through their mill but got very little gold collected on the copper amalgam plates. The drive along the reef to the south had been extensively stoped above and was full of collapsed rubble, timbers etc. During the course of the day one of the old boys told me that when they first reopened and cleaned out the adit he had climbed over the first 30ft of collapsed stope :argh: and taken a sample from the lode track in the floor of the drive. He said that they'd had it assayed and it had come back at around 1ounce per ton. so they decided to drive to the north in the hope that they'd get more positive returns from ground that hadnt been stope out overhead.
My Guess is that the ore they put through their mill was complex and refractory being very high in sulphides and that the gold was not free to amalgamate because it was locked up within these complex sulphides. I have a small sample of the mineral from this lode and it is very heavy, black and greasy to the touch. Ive often thought about having it assayed or at least shooting it with an XRD gun.
The moral to my story is I guess even if the assay shows a good grade can it be processed to recover the gold values indicated or is the vien too narrow or the water too heavy or the location too remote. All these things add up to defeat you before you even strike a pick blow. :/
 

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