GOLD FROM BEACH SAND

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXI, Issue 14, 30 December 1930, Page 9

GOLD FROM BEACH SAND

SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS. QUEENSLAND MEN BUSY. Sydney, Deo. 19. So eager has the search for gold in Australia become that it is not surprising that two Brisbane men claim now that they have perfected apparatus for taking gold from the sand on the beaches round the Australian coast.

They have been experimenting in a chemical laboratory for months past, and they have already obtained remarkable success from experiments on sand from the south coastal beaches of Queensland. The men are Messrs W. J. Lynch, mining engimer, and H. C. Oakes, analyst and assayer. They say that their device is capable of concentrating sand to less than one per cent, of its original bulk in one operation, and at the same time, retaining all the gold bulk contained. Pa rolls of beach sand showing on assay only a few grains of gold to the ton were concentrated with the machine, and assays of the concentrates gave up to five ounces to the ton of coucentratesj "Examination under a magnifying glass,” said Mr. Lynch, "shows that these concentrates contain also platinum, tin and zircon. Some showed rutiles, silver and titanium.” There could be no question, he said, of the richness in precious metals of many beaches of sand between Cairns and Byron Bay, on the New South Wales coast. Experiments have shown that those beaches were similar to those on the coast of Florida, which hud been treated with profit by various Amtrican companies before the war.

Sand is fed into a central hopper bv means of an ordinary sand pump. It is then distributed by four pipe leads into a cylinder, in which constantly flowing water is agitated by a submerged propeller paddle. This provides a centrifugal force, by which waste and concentrates are separated, the latter being accumulated for subsequent removal and treatment. Both inventors are convinced that what the model can do in the way of oxtraction from small quantities of sand, could be done by similar machines constructed to handle four or five tons of sand an hour on the beaches.