August 12 2010 by Darrin.

Summer’s been pretty hectic here. In May, our 20-year Mexican ranch hand finally left us and our “bunk house” modular home - after getting a job with the local billionaire.  On his way out, the vaquero walked off with some family heirloom furniture, most light bulbs, and an unpaid balance of heat and rent from the year he lived in the house and worked for someone else.

Mom decided to clean and redecorate the modular home in June and early July, before she was inundated with guests in late July.  Anna and I had friends coming from Germany about the same time as Mom’s family was to arrive, and Anna’s dad, Frits, visited last week from Holland too.  We did get to make a couple little trips here and there with Frits - most notably to Devil’s Tower and Mount Rushmore…

We made the trip just a few days before the huge Sturgis Bike Week in South Dakota, so as you can imagine, most traffic was on two wheels. Here’s a photo from Deadwood on Aug 5th…

 Back at home, I got a few hours per day of welding in on my new fuel tank for the old Land Cruiser.  It’s taken forever to get it done, and I’ve been procrastinating for a couple reasons…  1) I wasn’t sure how I was going to fill this tank at fuel pumps, and 2) I’m not an accomplished TIG welder.  I’ve had this machine for over a decade now, and only used it to build about 60 Unimog engine block heaters back in 1999 or so.  That’s a decade of dust…

 Good, clean TIG welding takes talent and skill - neither of which I possess.  I learned the basics of stick welding in junior high some 28 years ago, and have been welding with MIG for most of my years fabricating in Wyoming.  I set a goal to TIG this tank together, and that’s exactly what I did.  By the end, things were looking okay.  The real test will be if these joints hold #2 fuel oil without leaking…

Before I could locate the tank in its final position in between the rear frame rails, I had to solve the fuel fill problem.  My friend Paul in MD cut a fuel hatch and fill pipe from a car in his tow yard, but it turned out to be for the wrong side of the vehicle and a big pain in the butt to reverse.  I went to our local wrecking yard and found this donor - a 1983 Suburban…

A couple cordless tools and 30 minutes is all it took to get what I needed (plus a trip to NAPA for a new locking fuel cap)…

Back at the shop, I check the location for the new “Aux Tank Fill”, added a 2″ fuel filler pipe, and then located the tank at a good spot in the frame…

  All that’s left now is a tank vent, and the mounting brackets.

(Thanks to Mom for snapping a few pix at the junkyard, while watching for rattlesnakes - and sparks, that might light up the grass.  Thanks to OK-Wrecking owner Dave for charging me $0 for the old Chevy parts.)

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June 18 2010 by Darrin.

It’s almost 22:00 on Friday night, and my friend Pete and I have been mostly “on the go” since Tuesday at 17:30.  During that time, we logged around 1030 miles traveling from Wyoming through Colorado and back home.  Pete had some medical tests to take care of in Denver, and then we went to see some other Wyoming friends now living back in Colorado between Florissant and Cripple Creek [below, green square “1″].  For those unfamiliar, this is just west of Pike’s Peak, and about an hour and a quarter west of Colorado Springs [red square “2″].

Our friends, Rod and Getta, were originally from Colorado, moved to Wyoming for the employment opportunities, and headed back to Colorado six or seven years ago to be near their kids again.  They both found new jobs at the Cripple Creek & Victor Mine - a South African-owned gold mining operation.   Originally, the area was underground stope-mined and boomed in the early 1900s. Old derricks and huge winches like you see here are all over the hills.  Rumor has it they lowered foals down these shafts with the winches, and the young horses were put into service, never to see the light of day again.  They grew to be too large to ever lift out.  (This particular example was electric, and the photo on the right shows some early braking resistors.)

 There are still a few ‘mom and pop’ mines in the area, but CC&V is the Big Dog.  It’s now surface (leach) mined by crushing rock and soaking it with a solution of sodium cyanide and some other “good stuff”. In the following photos, you can see the surface mining process as the rock is blasted out (left) and hauled to the leach pit on top of a rubber liner (the black in the center photo).  The aurocyanide solution drips through the crushed rock, runs down the liner, and is then pumped up to the refinement building by the pumps at the bottom of the pit (right).

Things are still pretty low key, and Rod gave us an incredible tour of the business, even though he officially retired as a CC&V electrician less than a week ago!  Here’s he is (right) with Pete (left) as we’re about to go inside the building that processes the aurocyanide solution and refines it into gold…

 It’s too late for me to Google it and figure it all out, but the solution runs down these little “pools”, all the while becoming more concentrated.  Here are some photos from inside.  Naturally, DON’T drink the water (or lick the soles of your shoes after you leave).

 The solution is refined and refined some more, and then eventually makes its way into some electrolysis tanks where electrical current deposits the leached metals onto a steel wool type material.  This stuff is then eventually thrown into a 3,000,000 BTU furnace where it melts and is poured into a little cone called a button (right, covered in slag)…

Once cooled, it’s sampled, weighed, and put into a safe.  Here’s Pete with the button we just watched pour out of the crucible…

And another shot of Pete, Rod, and me as we stand on front of the safe door…

So, what’s in that button?  Well, this one weighed 940 Troy ounces (~64.5 lbs).  It was 82% gold, 17% silver, and 1% copper.  We won’t worry about the silver or copper; 82% of 940 oz is 771 oz of gold.  And on that day, gold was $1245/oz.  That’s around $960,000 in gold.  In one lump.  And they produce 4,000 to 5,000 oz per week, 52 weeks per year.

Now if you think you’re about to get into this “easy money”, consider that it takes about 350 dump trucks to make one of these buttons.  And these dump trucks haul 300 TONS of rock at a whack.  (That’s 105,000 tons, or 210 MILLION pounds of rock.)  This mine burns 25,000 gallons of diesel per week.  (Pete points out that his coal mine in our beloved Wyoming burns up 600,000 gallons of #2 diesel per week.  Yeah, SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND GALLONS per week.  And they use 400 TON trucks.  They ship a hundred million TONS of coal per year.  Now THAT’S mining.)

So what’s a 300-ton capacity gold-minin’ haul truck look like?  Check it out, and BE SURE to stop at the stop signs when you cross the haul road…

Of the 350 loads per button, about 250 of them are overburden and other rock that doesn’t contain the good ore.  It’s dumped elsewhere.

Oh, one final note: The crucibles from the furnace last about 30 buttons.  They’ll do a few more, but it’s pushing it.  The bottoms start to burn out, and the gold can leak out onto the floor.  Shaun, the final production manager (red shirt, standing by the crucible) said, “Yeah, we don’t use ‘em for more than about 30 pours.  The boss gets kinda pissed when you spill a million dollars of gold into the concrete below the furnace.”

 For what it’s worth, the crucibles (made in Germany) run about $1500 each, and after 30 pours, they’re crushed and also smelted off-site, where they yield 5 or 6 ounces of gold.  (~$6,800)

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