Also gold is basically inert and won t dissolve in or react with any household acids or chemicals Panning is a good way to separate the particles in the crushed rock, provided the gold is coarse enough not likely and the crushed material is sieved so as to be uniform in size...
Powdering the rock The next step was to take the crushed pieces of rock and make them even smaller We used a heavy metal rod a broken half shaft from a four wheel drive and smashed the small bits of rock in a saucepan The rock needed to be powdered for us to get to all the gold within the rock...
Crushing the Rock To make it accessible, extractors crush the rocks into small pebbles and then grind the pebbles into a powder In days gone by, miners and prospectors did this with hammers and a mortar and pestle, but modern gold processors use large machines called crushers to make the pebbl...
Finally, once the rock is fully crushed we get to the part about separating out the gold from the crushed rock Often, this is accomplished simply by very careful panning Panning is the most suitable method if you only have an amount of rock less than about 15 or 20 pounds...
I ve crushed quarts and found specs of gold not visible in the rock and not detectable by the rock I ve crushed many, many more quartz rocks that had nothing I ve ,...