When is enough improvements enough?

[seafox]

every one says all the gold catches in the top couple feet of the sluice. yet when tony Beats didn't like the recovery of the gold dredge lengthened the sluices what from 40 to 55 feet. ? Ive been rebuilding my highbanker. changing the layout to make it more stable ( two 5 gallon buckits of gravels in the distruction chamber caused it to overturn last time it was used.} I measured it at 35 feet over all but I do not know if I will use all the flume ( sluice) sections, have bent a couple new ones, and have worked on making my own mats. have a testing area in the distruction chamber like doc from gold hog put in the monster. increased the distruction chamber from 2 to three feet. drilled the holes in my punch plate grizzley bigger.

still I have a half built tromel but is it any better than the distruction chamber?

have just about every mat design I can think of and some gold hog mats also. was thinking about putting in a section of flume with drop pockits with a sluice gate in the middle so the water goes down acrost and back up. read a paper from a newzealand beach miner saying this was the best design because of the fluid bed actiopn ie rising water carrys off the waste material leaving the gold behind. his design has 4 cm wall on the uphill side of the pockit 4 cm acrost the flat bottom and 3 cm on the down hill. is it worth it to add it?

my friend vince whos mined for 40 odd years says that more than 8 or 12 feet of sluice is a waste but have found gold all the way down to second to last sluice which is where I had my gold hog mats . last mat was home made 18 inch wide by 6 feet long with 8th inch wide saw cuts in conveyer belting and think it caught some gold too.

last question how deep do you like to run the water in your sluices?

thankyou and hoping for an early spring

 

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[juneaupanner]

Go with the kiss method. Otherwise you will just become a slave not only to yourself but to the miners who know how to mine the miners.

 

[63bkpkr]

seafox, seems like you could benefit from having a good sized catch trap at the end of your sluice (like a large plastic cement mixing box from home depot) to determine at what length your sluice starts loosing gold. It will make for some additional panning but it would answer the question for you. Of course as the angle of the box changes with the flow of the water (steeper to lower angle) you will likely see a shift in what may come off the end of any given length of sluice box. And of course you do not need to use gold for the test as pieces of lead would work fairly well to learn the basic needs of your system.

I would also think that changing the mat types will add to the difficulty of the solution as I would think when the mat types are changed to different locations the end results shift. You've given yourself a lot of homework to do, might go back to the design table to confirm where the mat types belong in the system before going back out to the river. Good luck with your experiments!.............63bkpkr

 

[Underburden]

Since you quoted Doc, pay attention to his "BUS" theory.

 

[Bejay]

"last question how deep do you like to run the water in your sluices?"


As deep as the largest rocks that go down your sluice....which in turn is dependent on the how large you allow to enter. Then adjust the slope to allow those rocks in the water depth to move down the sluice freely; and not hang up on the riffles. The depth of the water......the specific gravity of the rock in that water, and the slope if set correctly will capture the gold.

Bejay

 

[Bonaro]

Gold stops in the first couple riffles but the longer you run the farther some of the fines can work down. Tony Beets is running thousands of yards of material and cleaning up maybe once a week. You are running a highbanker and cleaning up after a couple hours.
Forget the extension and shovel on

 

[arizau]

every one says all the gold catches in the top couple feet of the sluice. yet when tony Beats didn't like the recovery of the gold dredge lengthened the sluices what from 40 to 55 feet. ? Ive been rebuilding my highbanker. changing the layout to make it more stable ( two 5 gallon buckits of gravels in the distruction chamber caused it to overturn last time it was used.} I measured it at 35 feet over all but I do not know if I will use all the flume ( sluice) sections, have bent a couple new ones, and have worked on making my own mats. have a testing area in the distruction chamber like doc from gold hog put in the monster. increased the distruction chamber from 2 to three feet. drilled the holes in my punch plate grizzley bigger.

still I have a half built tromel but is it any better than the distruction chamber?

have just about every mat design I can think of and some gold hog mats also. was thinking about putting in a section of flume with drop pockits with a sluice gate in the middle so the water goes down acrost and back up. read a paper from a newzealand beach miner saying this was the best design because of the fluid bed actiopn ie rising water carrys off the waste material leaving the gold behind. his design has 4 cm wall on the uphill side of the pockit 4 cm acrost the flat bottom and 3 cm on the down hill. is it worth it to add it?

my friend vince whos mined for 40 odd years says that more than 8 or 12 feet of sluice is a waste but have found gold all the way down to second to last sluice which is where I had my gold hog mats . last mat was home made 18 inch wide by 6 feet long with 8th inch wide saw cuts in conveyer belting and think it caught some gold too.

last question how deep do you like to run the water in your sluices?

thankyou and hoping for an early spring

As to the New Zealand beach design. That was the concept behind the development of the Gold Cube and is meant for mostly sand feed or at least minus 1/8" for the cube itself. As you are probably aware the cube is effective and popular among many miners today especially those who mine beach sands. There was a stream sluice developed by a Colorado man a few years back using the same concept but haven't heard anything about it recently so I guess he gave up on making and marketing it(?). From what I remember, it seemed it needed in stream adjustments of the gate and was a major hassle (or no more effective than a conventional sluice) for those who used it.

I build a lot of my own equipment and am firmly in favor of the kiss method. That said, I can imagine that each different riffle design that you are using is best set up separately so the pitch, flow and depth can be tuned in to operate most effectively and those settings may not work well with the next different styled set of riffles, etc.

Good luck.

 

[seafox]

thankyou all for your replys. between cabin fever and preswure of day jobs to keep going I try to squeeze in working on the dreaqm. this is likely the last year with my friend that owns the claims and hope to make enough to buy them. just wish I had faith in me. make more mistakes than I want ( like taking a bottle of chemicals to the truck for hazardus waste and looking at my hand and see a trowel insteed of the bottle) have about one month to get readey and need to set up at home and convince my friend to try my equipment. thankyou for pointing out the part about the volume and cleanout differences I was not thinking of that my thoiught is to run all day and not waste the time cleaning out while my friend wants to see how we are doing and our cleanouts nhave droped from hour and a half to 45 minutes though I've worked to get that back to 75 minutes because he gets negitive if he is not seeing enough gold and a 45 minute run is pretty sure to have less gold than a 75 minute run.

maybe I am thinking wrongly but the extream length of my sluice helps compensate for less carefull loading of the highbanker. ie want to dump a 5 gallon buckit of gravel in the distruction chamber and let it work its self through while I get in more digging. the friends' keene highbanker at 4 feet long ( and I talked him into adding a gold hog mat 4 foot long lower sluice but he doesn't think it gets anything) I just remember when I was younger and really gungho and over fed it the whole first trip and like the bus theory no empty seats and hardly any gold taken home

thankyou again and may we all have a happy and suscesful year
jef