What did you do in the shop today?

[Frosty]

WOW, take a little breather and all sorts of things show up! Cool.

Davor: There are lots of good possibilities for a stable turn table for the table cart axle, a salvaged office chair is a good one and heavy duty versions are for sale though I don't know about there. Here I can drive to two large supplier outlets, Grainger and Fastenal and have a selection. Heck, it's hard to get out of either for all the shelf and bin browsing I find myself doing. 

Turning too sharp has always been a good way to dump a wagon. Maybe put a lower shelf on it so you can keep the weight low when you're taking it out to the BBQ pit or tables in the park, etc. 

Another good option is put a a couple stops to limit on how far it can turn.

That's a nice looking pick Billy, how far did you draw the temper back? Picks aren't really for rocks, they're for loosening hard soils and prying rocks out. I'd maybe give an old hammer head a smack on the face to make sure the pick deforms. It would be a real shame if it chipped and someone got hurt, No? 1045 is a pretty safe bet, much safer than spring steel!

Prospecting is always or usually fun, production or mining not so much. 

A nugget is placer gold, Placer is deposited in "soil" be it a stream bed modern or ancient it's loose gold particles in "soil," eroded from the veins where it formed. The other kind of common gold is hard rock where you follow a vein through the rock and remove the gold by whatever means is called for. That isn't to say you can't find hard rock gold laying loose or in a soil strata but it wont show signs of alluvial (water) weathering, it'll be in a vein in the pebble or boulder. If the rock is stream bed smooth it's placer.

Confused? Me too, I have been all my life. Dad knew more about rocks, mineral, gems, etc. than many holding doctorates and I heard about it from WAY back. He was that way about tying knots, I heard about tying a Bowline my whole life and it never took. Then one day we're in the field and needed to tie a knot properly, I'm looking at the rope I'm holding and there's Dad's voice and I knew how to tie a bowline. One handed and in a flicker of time. Do it slowly so the other guys could follow? Not so much. Dad couldn't tie one slowly.

We used to pan gold while we stream fished for trout. Turns out trout like to hang where gold drops out of the fast water as it swirls behind a rock, log, etc. Most gold is carried around obstructions rather than over. If there is a rock with water flowing over, pan in front of it too. It won't be as rich as behind but there will be a concentration in front too. Usually right against the rock.

I liked my old steel pans too, a little rust and plenty of scratches makes them work better. If you can find a new steel pan be sure to wash the lube off or you'll wash more fines through than recover. 

We panned with mercury and two different solutions to #1 break surface tension of water and #2 break the mercury's surface tension. 

An inventor friend of Dad's, call him "Woody" had an associate who came up with a really phenomenal solution that broke both so even the "colloidal sized" gold fell out of solution and could be captured by the mercury. Being struck with gold fever Woody's buddy never wrote the formula or process down and his memory wasn't as good as he thought so it's effectiveness fell off becoming essentially worthless. Analyzing it didn't do any good as none of the original existed and the new solutions were just stuff.

What I use anymore is a drop of the old phosphate loaded Dawn dish soap and a few drops of nitric acid. The old formula Jet Dry worked nicely but I haven't tried the new formula. I expect if I were running a production operation I'd just buy "Sodium Laurel Sulphate," it's what we used in the soils lab to cause complete wetting of every darned thing in the wash pan. Nitric converts mercury oxide to pure mercury. Call it a reducing agent.

Our part in the operation was making extraction equipment. The amalgamator caused any gold in the concentrates to form amalgam with the mercury which we extracted with the separator. 

Last and the one that scares folks the most was separating the gold and mercury. The old way that killed so many folk is to boil the mercury and condense it elsewhere. A favorite method in the gold fields was to cut a potato in half and cover an amalgam filled dent in a pan, heat the pan till the mercury had boiled off leaving the gold dust in the dent. The mercury was "captured" in the potato for reuse. All but the fumes that escaped that is. In it's pure form mercury isn't so toxic as it is far from water soluble so your body doesn't absorb it very well if at all. Mercury exposed to air on the other hand is covered with mercury oxide which is water soluble and boiling it fills the air with mercury oxide salts which WILL kill you in a while. 

We dissolved amalgam in nitric acid which left the gold at the bottom of the flask, we decanted the acid off for processing and reuse, rinsed the gold and weighed it in. Recovering the mercury was a simple matter of dissolving zinc which precipitated the mercury to out of solution for reuse. The acid would become saturated with zinc and got disposed of.

That's as far as I remember about the extraction process, I have no idea how the zinc saturated nitric acid was. . . (whatever they did with it)

Something that made me pretty uninterested in gold mining, even prospecting is how many gold crazy people I met at a young age. Gold was all they saw or thought about, often walking away from better money because it wasn't gold. Some would consider silver. . . maybe. We used to run around claims with the demonstrator units and run samples of their tailings after they'd extracted what they could. We regularly recovered more than they had after two runs through their equipment. 

Something we saw frequently in California gold country when break even was $22/ton, was "profitable" $25/ton (late 60s$) concentrates, maybe 1: 10 but an easy half the claims were recovering upwards of $50/ton in mercury. Break even gold or not there was almost always profitable levels of mercury.

Just panning in mountain streams (with mercury and a drop of magic juice of course) we'd regularly get WAY more mercury than gold. Put 1/2tsp of mercury in the pan and get back 2-3tsp. and coolest just panning for mercury usually recovered a respectable amount of gold. If 1/50 the value of the mercury.

Frosty The Lucky.

[BillyBones]

Wow, that is way more information about gold than i can digest right now. 

I have not heat treated yet. But was figuring on drawing it back to an almost purple. That is what i figured it would be for more scraping and breaking up soil than hard digging. 

[JHCC]

Also, cut away one side of my grinder station and welded in a frame made from an old bed rail:

To hold a recently acquired tackle box:

 Which in turn holds supplies for the buffer:

[George N. M.]

Billy, just print out or email the gold panning posts to your friend and let him do with the information as he will.  Or, keep it to yourself if you have been bitten by the gold bug. 

BTW, don't eat the potato.  Yes, as Frosty says, metallic mercury isn't particularly dangerous but some folk go nutso about it.  When my son was in elementary school a kid brought in a vial of mercury that he had brought back from a trip to Mexico and, of course, it got broken and spilled.  They closed the school and brought in a hazmat team to clean it up.  An over reaction IMO. 

G

[Frosty]

Good catch George! Don't eat the potato!!!

If you spill mercury a soft bristle brush and galvanized dust pan work nicely just do NOT brush vigorously or you'll flick it everywhere. A copper brush will pick it up too. I wonder how the hazmat crew cleaned it up. It just occurred to me that gold leaf would work beautifully, you could work it into the tiniest nooks and crannies by pressing it in with a soft brush. 

Of course there are worse things to over react to.

Frosty The Lucky.

[JHCC]

1 hour ago, Frosty said:

I wonder how the hazmat crew cleaned it up

I believe powdered lime sulfur is the standard mercury spill cleanup, but I could be wrong. 

[Frosty]

I don't know what I was thinking I did a quick search and the CDC has specific instructions for small spills, 1lb and smaller, that's 2 tbsp. Forget what I said, below is the link to the CDC recommendations. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/mercury/docs/Residential_Hg_Spill_Cleanup.pdf

After reading that I must have killed myself in my teens! 

I wonder what they'd say about the Autunite crystals I had in my bedroom?

Frosty The Lucky.

 

 

[BillyBones]

One summer they renovated our old Jr. high school (used to be the high school until the mid 80's). Built in the late 50's. When they were taking out the sinks in the science classrooms they discovered tons of mercury in the drains. For years it was just dumped down the sink from what i came to understand. 

Amazing how any of us survived childhood. Playing with mercury, lead based paint, asbestos, drinking water from the hose, long hours shirtless in the sun...

[JHCC]

The question isn't how we survived childhood; it's how many didn't. See Abraham Wald and the bullet hole map.

[Frosty]

Isn't that a head slapper. Obvious when you think about it but it needs something to get you thinking about it that way. Good search subject, thanks.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Nobody Special]

I've seen the gold fever. They get crazy. You can pan for it lots of places. I've found a few flecks embedded in rocks here (Whidbey Island) dropped by glaciers when I was hunting for jasper and agates. An Army buddy (the guy that taught me to make moonshine, before he got kicked out for...go figure, DUIs) had a brother that used to pan streams on their land up near Dahlonega, GA. It wasn't worth professionally mining, and he didn't make much, but he could work four hours a day and make a lot more than flipping burgers.

Seems like a lot of the really good mines started by people fixated on gold, or sometimes silver. Come for the gold, stay for the tin, mercury, copper, antimony, bismuth, lead...Bisbee got started that way in the 1800s, and they were taking copper out of the ground until the 70s. They also had that whole thing where they rounded up a few thousand men supposedly for being Wobblies and tried to get the Army to put them in a detention camp, but that's this whole other story.

[George N. M.]

I had a friend in law school who had previously worked for the Union Pacific Railroad.  It was a union shop and you had to belong to a union but it wasn't specified which union.  For some reason my friend had a grudge about the regular railroad unions.  So, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka Wooblies) which are still an active organization.  That satisfied his union membership requirement.

The IWW did have good songs.  They say you aren't a real radical unless you know ALL the verses to "The Red Flag."

GNM

PS Here is a link to the IWW's website: https://www.iww.org/

[BillyBones]

Interesting fact i found out, the most mined substance in the world today is sand. 

My knowledge of what minerals that are around me is rocks and dirt. As a matter of fact that is about what i know about geology at all. Really though around here to find anything of value like that it would be either Indian artifacts like arrow heads, spear points, etc. or fossils. 

Oaks Quarry park, Frosty knows of it, is about a mile from my house. Someone there a couple years back found a fossil of some kind of tube worm. Now the shells of them are pretty common but this one had the worm's "head" sticking out of it. Looked kind of like palm leaves. It was valued at many thousands of dollars. I have found a lot of what i used to call natalists but i think someone told me they were ammonites iirc. 

The Indian artifacts that have been found here are really old as well. 500BC old. If you find something you are allowed to keep it but if you sell it you break a few laws. There are ways to sell the stuff but it is not easy.  

I have found a few semi precious stones, carbuncle, garnet, amethyst, etc. And one piece someone told me was jade but i have my doubts. Being this area i live was were the glaciers stopped, we have a town just south of me called Moraine, it can be a toss up on what you will find. So, thar maybe gold in them thar hills yet. 

Ohio also has a lot of flint and if pyrite were valued like gold, we would all be rich. 

I used to live with a girl that was a geologist and here father was a geology professor at an Ivy League school. When she moved in she was the one who told me my water stunk like sulfur becuase there was a vein of pyrite under the house, the bacteria eating the pyrite waste product was what gave it the sulfur smell. She took care of that and as long as we lived there had good water. 

[Florida Man Metals]

     I read a while back that pyrite actually contains nanoparticles of gold in it. More recently I read about lithium being in pyrite. They are looking at it for industrial lithium extraction.

[George N. M.]

Billy, you may have found an ammonite that was buried quickly enough that the ctitter's soft parts were preserved.  In life an ammonite looked like a modern nautalus, a squid with its tail stuffed into a shell. Some have straight, cone shaped shell but many have coiled shell, like a snail.  Hence the name.  The shells are supposed to look like the coiled ram's horns of the Egyptian god Amun/Ammon.

I've seen some that are completely replaced by pyrite and have a spectacular gold/brass color.

G

PS  To bad about your geologist ex.  MY experience has been that geologists make good partners.

[Nobody Special]

20 hours ago, George N. M. said:

The IWW did have good songs.  They say you aren't a real radical unless you know ALL the verses to "The Red Flag."

GNM

 

I don't know ALL the verses, but I can sing Which Side Are You On and the Union Maid drunk, blindfolded, and backwards...and for that matter the regular way.  Also, thank you for that ear worm, my wife just asked why I was going around the house singing "Oh Christmas Tree". Sigh...

You're right about the sand. Want a weirder fact? They're running out. Different kinds of sand have very different kinds of uses depending on the composition, size, and sharpness of the corners making it up. Sand found say in the desert is no good for construction and cement making because it's rounded off from centuries of exposure and erosion. I don't think this is the article I was looking for, but... The Story Of Sand In 'The World In A Grain' : NPR

Or did ya mean the one by Connell to the other tune?

[Hefty]

Until I checked which words were capitalised, the title of the second song you listed had a very different meaning!!

[George N. M.]

One of the big uses of sand is to prop open the cracks created by high pressure in fracking to increase oil and gas recovery.  The cracks in the reservoir rock are created by high pressure and then a sand slurry is pumped in to hold the cracks open when the pressure is released.

Some of the best sand is produced along the Mississippi River in MN, WI, and IA.  And the deposits are becoming depleated.

Also, some alluvial sand and sandstone is unsuitable for some uses because of trace minerals.  The sand and river gravel around here is unsuitable for making concrete because it has a small amount of volcanic rocks in it which have an origin in the headwaters of the Laramie River about 60 miles away in Colorado.  The volcanic rocks react with the cement in the concrete and cause it to crack and weather prematurely.  Sand used in glass making has to be very pure and much of any other minerals as trace constituents make it unsuitable.

GNM

[Frosty]

Billy: Your water smelled of sulfur because pyrite is iron sulfide and degrades into rust and sulfur compounds hence aroma. Do you remember how your lady de-stinked your water? IIRC charcoal filters work for sulfur but I'm not sure.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

 

[BillyBones]

Sodium hypochlorite pumped into the well, or as most people call it bleach. (yes i did have to look up the name) 

We had one of those whole house filter systems but i did nothing for the smell of the water. 

[Ridgeway Forge Studio]

Finally finished the new stand for my 12 ton hydraulic press. I mounted the power pack and tank below the H frame to save space and keep things cleaner. One step towards cleaning up my shop!

[Chad J.]

Yesterday I found; the floor to my shop, a counter top, a pan that I had used to hold water next to the belt grinder, the stand that the pan stood on,  my tablesaw, a place to put my snow blower, several half finished knives, my first attempt at a towel hanger,  and space to set the coffin bookshelf back up so I can finish it now that it's warm again.   I also rearranged my tool peg board so I can actually hang tools on it and made a quick hook for it.   It used to take me hours, maybe exaggerated,  to make a single hook for the peg board, yesterday the one I knocked out quick as a reward to myself for cleaning took maybe 5 minutes and looked much better.   Still just as proud of the early ones.

 

[JHCC]

A little Repoussé-on-the-Road. 

[Frosty]

Good job Chad, a clear floor and bench gives you so much MORE room to lay stuff down! While drying off after this morning's shower I saw the snow blocking the man door on my closed up for winter shop looks clear enough to shovel my way in. Cleaning it though . . . <sigh>

Nice peg board hooks, did you put an upwards curve on the peg so it's locked in when there's weight on the hook? It doesn't take much but it really stabilizes the hook.

Not taking much time to turn out things like simple hooks really improves them. When I'm just warming up right after I open the shop in spring I make leaf coat hooks, in part because I use them as a forge product #1 for beginners. When I get my self back up to speed I spend about 7 minutes from cutting the stock to brushing and waxing the finished hook. I start with 3/8" sq. hot rolled, twist the shank, draw the hook, leaf, vein the leaf, counter punch the screw holes, brush hard and apply my Trewax finish at a temp that makes it smoke so it comes out black.

Later I may use a leaf die so the veins stand proud but I'm not so crazy about the dies I've come up with. Surprisingly it's more work than drawing and veining by hand. 

Anyway, in spring it takes me 15+ minutes to make a leaf hook and they're okay. Later when I'm cranking them in 7mins. or so they start coming out looking and working well.

I think I have a peg board in the shop maybe I'll have to clean a path and make some hooks. 

Do your hooks want to turn sideways in use? Commercial peg board hooks have multiple pegs and or a spread bar to keep them facing straight.

Turning has always been my issue with making peg board hooks. It's not insurmountable but it is unsatisfying having to add chachkas to keep them straight.

An old acquaintance made little snake pegs that looked like they were slithering down the wall, neck and head raising into hooks. As I recall he said he spent 10+ minutes on them. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[Chad J.]

Thanks Frosty, I once had another smith over and she commented that she could get months of projects out of my rejects on the floor. 

For the hook, I didn't,  I just went down.   Most of the hooks I made in the past didn't fit well, a little too big on the hook,  so they didn't turn much.   What I think I may play with now is putting a tight s bend in the hook to keep it from twisting.  Maybe I'll do one tonight and see how it looks and do the offset upward hook.  Might as well pay with the designs,  Father's Day is coming up and what Dad didn't like hanging tools nice and neat on pegboard.