Portable Mineral Jig Washplant

Looks like an interesting option…

1 Like

Thanks, jigs are an interesting design I’ve not encountered in my searches.

1 Like

Cheers for that. Good video - I didn’t know that’s how jigs worked.

I still can’t get my head around them too much.
But here is some of the basics.
Water is fed into a piston (hydraulic) and when the pressure builds a spring is compressed and the exit valve for the water is accessed.
That is when a little spout of low pressure water bursts out.
Then spring pushes back down.
Repeat that, depending on your pump speed = water pressure => speed

Next part is the filters.
You feed the gravel (most of these are concentrators but you could do larger gravel with a sturdier/large design)into the top (this top area can have a small amount of water), gradually the water filters it through the gauze.

The larger stones are gently pushed to an exit pipe at top.
This exit pipe goes to a Safety Tray (if you have higher pressure you could be washing gold away).
All the gold and finer particles move down into a tube filled with ball bearings.
The gold particles can filter through the ball bearings as gold is heavier than steel.
The ball bearings sit on a gauze. Below this is a clear tube with a removable catcher.
Just below the gauze is a water outpipe (it must have a few fine filters on it) that feeds back into the water pump.

Also the pump draws the water from the Safety Tray, so it is a closed system - great for preserving water in mountains.

A bit that I don’t understand is that the pressure can be increased so the ball bearings lift up creating spaces for larger gold particles.

The ball bearings, closed water system, and jig variable water pump action are all very cool design ideas. Though I feel this could be made simpler.

Another similar design that I found pushes the water up to create a vortex. Dunno how it exactly works, he’s disabled comments which make’s me a little suspicious of it’s effectiveness.

Here is a very simple design (Auzzie? or Kiwi?)

1 Like

Old thread bump…
I used to use 2 sets of jigs on a 30t / hr plant in the Pilbara for handling the fines down to a concentrate level. They were finicky and susceptible to over-feeding and changes in the make-up of the classified ore. The ones I used were ‘Yuba’ type, with wheelbarrow tyre diaphragms on the side, operated by a rocker arm.
Effective, but required constant monitoring, unlike the rest of the plant (trammel and shaking sluices).