While venturing into a gold mine is fun and exciting, it can also be intimidating and dangerous as all mines are underneath the earth’s surface in some shape or form. Working in a gold mine is no easy job as it will take extensive amounts of time and effort to find any pieces of gold. In order to break ground on a brand new gold mine, you will have to assemble a team of committed workers to dig, drill and blast through all the rough spots of the new mine.
You have to first create a smooth path for a railway so that you can easily go in and out of the mine with the help of mine cart transportation. Gold mining will also take the right equipment to go as deep as you and your team of miners expect. Since you are going underground, always prepare for possible safety issues by putting on a hard hat, and to see where you are going in the mine, make sure that there is a light attached to the hard hat. All gold mines will be dark inside and will only get darker the further you venture into one.
Tools such as pickaxes, hatchets, crowbars, normal hammers and sledgehammers are all sufficient to start out with when you need to cut through areas in the mine that are heavily covered by large rocks and hard dirt surfaces. Sand scooping tools are very helpful both in underground mines and outside on beach-like surfaces.
If you are in a mine that contains considerable amounts of water, you should resort to using water scooping tools and suction pumps as these tools will be able to pick heavy pieces of gold out of the water they are submerged under. Hand chisels and various thin crevice tools will also help you dig out all the hard to reach areas of a gold mine. Because of heavy the material is, gold has a tendency to stay buried and pinned inside the narrowest gaps of a mine.
There are plenty of tools to use outside the mine as well, which include the cradle rocker, a special device mainly used for placer mining. The cradle rocker is primitive and old fashioned but is indeed a natural and safe way to sort out materials. You just rock the cradle back and forth after dumping your water-filled materials through the filter of the device, and the smallest materials will steadily drop down to appear at the far end of the rocker.
Especially if your gold mine is in or next to a body of water, having a sluice box would be ideal as it will allow you to pump out water in a stream, and its riffles are designed to catch any heavy materials and prevent them from flowing all the way downstream. Many sluice boxes use conveyor belts which act as riverbeds, maintaining the water flow as it pushes forward. A gap that you see in a sluice box is a long enough gap which gathers all sorts of materials that come through the water flow, including gold.
You have to get the right flow of water in order to get your sluice box to work. Otherwise if too much water is put in too quickly through the sluice box, the overwhelming pace will cause all materials including the gold will rush downstream. If too little water is put in, then the spaces of in the sluice box’s riffles will be too easily filled, effectively letting the gold move past the clumps of materials that already occupy those spaces and downstream.
Processing plants are key instruments in advancing the daily workload of a gold miner as the largest processing plants can crush thousands of tons of rocks and ore. Processing plants mainly do their crushing in stages. Most processing plants are built to be stationary, but in recent times gold mining companies have created more versatile and economical mobile processing plants that they can move to any spot in the mining field. These innovative mobile plants are compact and portable, having a maximum capacity of 100 cubic meters per hour of continuous feed. These mobile processing plants can be towed by any powerful vehicles that you may have and they include power sources such as power generators, pumps, hydraulics and electric fuse boxes.
Some mobile processing plants feature a component called a primary concentrator which can crush as much as 40 tons of rock and ore per hour. The primary concentrator operates at a specific, calibrated G-Force, and its internal chambers fill with lighter material to form soft beds of water. The primary concentrator contains multiple chambers that work together to flush the concentrate into a receiver with the help of an electro welder and a diesel generator. Using a mobile processing plant, you can get a full day’s worth of production before you will need to flush it.
Another important part to have in the gold mining process would be a grinding mill. Grinding mills are used to grind various materials into powder, and this is a great way to find gold because nothing can be done by a grinding mills to alter any pieces of gold. Gold is too pure of a material to lose its shiny appeal.
There are numerous kinds of grinding mills to choose from, and one example would be the Ball Mill. The Ball Mill features two different ways of grinding, which would be the dry process and the wet process. The Ball Mill’s design consists of a feeding part, a discharge part, a gyre part, a transmission part and much more.
The Ball Mill has two separate chambers. Materials are evenly placed inside the first chamber along the input hollow axis by input devices. A ladder scale board and a ripple scale board are inside this first chamber. When the barrel body of the Ball Mill rotates, centrifugal force is developed. The steel balls that are installed on each scale board are carried to particular heights and then fall to strike the material, grinding the material afterward. After the first chamber grinds it up, the material is sent to the second chamber for regrinding, and the end result is powder being dumped by the output material board.
Other kinds of grinding mills include vertical grinding mills, high pressure mill machines, roller mills and trapezium grinding mills.