GOLD! (No, really!)

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Junkyard Wars : One Thread

To facilitate programming of ‘Junkyard Wars' for the American market RDF Media has moved a portion of their production company to California and has discovered there really IS gold in them thar hills! Tucked away in a corner of their new California junkyard the JYW staffers have discovered two enormous steel boxes of... dirt?

The steel boxes, each exactly three feed on a side and marked ‘1993' are discovered under a pile of old cars. Each box contains samples from placer deposits, destined for the Mining Division of the Department of Geology of a near-by state college. During the spring semester the samples were supposed to be processed by students to determine how much GOLD each contained. But on 17 January 1994 the area was rocked by the devastating Northridge Earthquake which caused extensively damage to the college and toppled the pile of cars onto the boxes. The ore samples were apparently forgotten in the aftermath. Now they belong to Junkyard Wars and what happens next is a no-brainer.

Go for the gold! Each cubic yard of material, weighing about one ton, just happens to include exactly one ounce of real California placer gold. How do you extract placer gold? Lots of ways! If the material is dry (and ours is) you may use a blast of air to separate the heavier gold from the lighter material or you may use water in the same manner, washing away the lighter material but allowing the gold to sink and become trapped. That means you'll need to come up with a pump (or air compressor) and sluices and trays, or a bellows and shaker tables and... whatever else you can think of. There's also the traditional gold pan, which is fun to use but not very exciting to watch. (It's used mostly for prospecting rather than extraction.)

The typical junkyard is a rich source of materials for a do-it-yourself placer mining operation. And one ton of material is easily handled by three men in well under an hour. (John Henry, the famous coal miner, produced sixteen tons of #9 coal every day :-)

-- Robert S. Hoover (veeduber@pacbell.net), February 26, 2001

Answers

THAT story was so good, I still don't know whether you're joking or not...

Anyway, make it the final challenge. The prize is what you dig!

-- Dan Denney (rustrenegades@hotmail.com), February 26, 2001.


This is a great example of how a suggestion should be presented. Thanks, Robert.

-- Rick Tyler (rick@raf.com), February 27, 2001.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ