MinerFortyNiner1952
Jr. Member
This weekend found me arriving at my friend's Grass Valley home, preparing for our monthly excursion to our claim.
Looking for a cheap way to increase our capacity, I had envisioned a homemade high banker hopper using a rectangular
Rubbermaid tub, an old barbeque grill, and numerous pieces of scrap aluminum angle iron.
We tossed around ideas for a while and realized that whatever we did would create other issues that would be as time
consuming as just classifying with the bucket and screen method. So we progressed to Plan B, grabbing the trusty
Keene catalog and seeing what was available. We already have a couple of Keene a52 sluices, one with sluice riffles
and one with the higher dredge riffles and had previously purchased a stand for the a52 box. We discovered our best
option was to obtain a Keene hopper that would bolt to our a52. On an impulse (insert gold fever here), we headed out
to the mining candy store, Pioneer Mining Supplies in Auburn, where we saw our vision materialize and we did the deal,
buying the hopper, nugget trap, and adapter that allowed for the conversion.
The next morning, we packed all our stuff down to the claim and we were ready to start the experiment. We had a
backpack dredge pump on site and thought that we could at least start with that, not knowing what to expect. While
the flow was great enough to wash the rocks, there certainly wasn't enough flow to push all the material through without
help . Our pump was woefully undersized for this app and even though we had to help the material through the sluice,
this method was an improvement over our previous method. Turns out the motor Keene suggest is a 100 GPM pump
while the one we had was only 10 GPM. (Ok, we will have to resolve this problem.) We decided to run for an hour and
do a clean up.
The gravel bar we are on is the same one that we have dug on in our two previous trips so we know that there is gold
there. Almost every test pan in almost every area shows colors, so we just began to dig and process. Just dumping
shovels full of dirt in the hopper caused the riffles to quickly load up so we had to slow the amount of dirt introduced
into the hopper, allowing the spray to wash the dirt from the shovel as opposed to just dumping it in. Not optimum,
but a vast improvement over our previous methods. We stopped after one hour and did a clean out and were happy
to discover that we had caught gold, chunky gold and flour gold. I do believe that we are losing some of the flour gold,
because the quantity isn't as great as the amounts of flour gold we had recovered in previous trips from less dirt.
We resumed processing, taking the top layer off the gravel closest to the water and then proceeding to an area up
bank, where we removed the top layer, and then started digging deeper, looking for bedrock. Underneath the top
layers of cobbles, we found a coarse sand and pebbly layer that tested well, so we decided to dig wider with the end
game to dig deeper. We needed a larger, wider hole so that it would allow us to roll boulders out of the way. All
total, we probably processed a half yard of dirt and rocks, taking our concentrates home for final cleanup.
Our cleanup process had consisted of classifying to an eight mesh, followed by running it through our cleanup sluice
and then panning. We used a blue bowl last time and also reran the material that had gone through the sluice.
Found four or five dots in that second pass so now we were unsure as to the effectiveness of our cleanup sluice. This
time we decided to classify to a 50 or 60 and run all through the blue bowl. As a test, we decided to rerun the blue
bowl cons through the cleanup sluice and were surprised to see that the blue bowl missed more gold than the cleanup
sluice did. I guess our new process will be to classify, run through the sluice twice, then the blue bowl and with the
final cleanup in a gold pan.
Relative to all our previous tips, our gold total is getting better. While not that impressive, the amount is weighable ,
coming in at a "whopping" .64 grams. You would think that working your a$$ off for a weekend would slightly diminish
the 'fever' but it only seems to fan the flames higher and higher. CAN'T WAIT TO GET BACK OUT THERE!!
Rick
Looking for a cheap way to increase our capacity, I had envisioned a homemade high banker hopper using a rectangular
Rubbermaid tub, an old barbeque grill, and numerous pieces of scrap aluminum angle iron.
We tossed around ideas for a while and realized that whatever we did would create other issues that would be as time
consuming as just classifying with the bucket and screen method. So we progressed to Plan B, grabbing the trusty
Keene catalog and seeing what was available. We already have a couple of Keene a52 sluices, one with sluice riffles
and one with the higher dredge riffles and had previously purchased a stand for the a52 box. We discovered our best
option was to obtain a Keene hopper that would bolt to our a52. On an impulse (insert gold fever here), we headed out
to the mining candy store, Pioneer Mining Supplies in Auburn, where we saw our vision materialize and we did the deal,
buying the hopper, nugget trap, and adapter that allowed for the conversion.
The next morning, we packed all our stuff down to the claim and we were ready to start the experiment. We had a
backpack dredge pump on site and thought that we could at least start with that, not knowing what to expect. While
the flow was great enough to wash the rocks, there certainly wasn't enough flow to push all the material through without
help . Our pump was woefully undersized for this app and even though we had to help the material through the sluice,
this method was an improvement over our previous method. Turns out the motor Keene suggest is a 100 GPM pump
while the one we had was only 10 GPM. (Ok, we will have to resolve this problem.) We decided to run for an hour and
do a clean up.
The gravel bar we are on is the same one that we have dug on in our two previous trips so we know that there is gold
there. Almost every test pan in almost every area shows colors, so we just began to dig and process. Just dumping
shovels full of dirt in the hopper caused the riffles to quickly load up so we had to slow the amount of dirt introduced
into the hopper, allowing the spray to wash the dirt from the shovel as opposed to just dumping it in. Not optimum,
but a vast improvement over our previous methods. We stopped after one hour and did a clean out and were happy
to discover that we had caught gold, chunky gold and flour gold. I do believe that we are losing some of the flour gold,
because the quantity isn't as great as the amounts of flour gold we had recovered in previous trips from less dirt.
We resumed processing, taking the top layer off the gravel closest to the water and then proceeding to an area up
bank, where we removed the top layer, and then started digging deeper, looking for bedrock. Underneath the top
layers of cobbles, we found a coarse sand and pebbly layer that tested well, so we decided to dig wider with the end
game to dig deeper. We needed a larger, wider hole so that it would allow us to roll boulders out of the way. All
total, we probably processed a half yard of dirt and rocks, taking our concentrates home for final cleanup.
Our cleanup process had consisted of classifying to an eight mesh, followed by running it through our cleanup sluice
and then panning. We used a blue bowl last time and also reran the material that had gone through the sluice.
Found four or five dots in that second pass so now we were unsure as to the effectiveness of our cleanup sluice. This
time we decided to classify to a 50 or 60 and run all through the blue bowl. As a test, we decided to rerun the blue
bowl cons through the cleanup sluice and were surprised to see that the blue bowl missed more gold than the cleanup
sluice did. I guess our new process will be to classify, run through the sluice twice, then the blue bowl and with the
final cleanup in a gold pan.
Relative to all our previous tips, our gold total is getting better. While not that impressive, the amount is weighable ,
coming in at a "whopping" .64 grams. You would think that working your a$$ off for a weekend would slightly diminish
the 'fever' but it only seems to fan the flames higher and higher. CAN'T WAIT TO GET BACK OUT THERE!!
Rick
