Hey sostahoe,
Welcome to the forum...
I am Klondike Ike..been playing in the mud seeking gold and silver for nearly 3 decades.... Its rare for silver to be in a placer..usually it is an ore which need to be treated to unlock the silver...buy occasionally, silver does run in veins much like gold and requires the similar recovery methods as you would for any lode mine...crushing and smelting...If it is a placer...then you can use a dredge just like you would for gold...but will need to clean up more often as the silver will accumulate in your recovery box faster than gold...
There is a small equipment company in Arizona, called Global Mining Solutions..... they sell a small but very, very effective separating shaker deck....called the RP-4...it runs about $1,900 plus shipping and it is maybe 2 or 3 feet long..and 18 inches wide and is about 1 foot tall...they also sell a stand for it for an additional cost to get it up around waist high.....
This unit will handle 700 pounds of cons (concentrates) per hour of 1/4 minus material... You have control over the water flow and pressure..and deck angle and shaking speed...plus it has rotating opposing magnets going around and around under the deck which causes all the heavy magnetics to really dance up and down as the magnetic flux changes direction...this allows the gold and silver to settle down to the bottom of the deck and not ride on top of the natural iron and magnetite (black sands) you'll find in stream beds....
It has 4 "leads" coming off it where the material is discharged off the deck... when properly let up, the first lead will be all gold.... the second lead will be more gold and less silver...the third lead will have more silver and less gold...and the fourth lead will have mostly just dead cons..with no real value...
When properly set up, it will capture down to 1 micron in size..nearly invisible to the human eye....you may have to re-run the 2nd and 3rd lead material a couple of times to get the best separation between the materials...
Once you have enough gold and silver accumulated.. send the gold..and the gold and silver combinations off to a commercial public smelter and you'll get back pure gold, pure silver or be cashed out for the values ....minus a small fee...
Hope that helps.... without equipment like this, you will spend endless hours with a pan trying to separate the gold and silver.....and eventually you will probably spend and equal amount of money the RP-4 cost, ...on good looking and fine sounding recovery items that you will eventually wind up, ...in the end .... to be very disappointed with...
Good luck on your project..
Klondike Ike
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