This rig gave me an idea

tamrock

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Jan 16, 2013
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This last week I was at the Las Vegas Mine Expo and I saw this wild piece of engineering. It's a hydraulic drive suction dredge with tillers to bust up the ground and a pump that was placed down close to the nozzle. I was thinking this would maybe suck a load of material from a beach deposit?. The crawler carriage will even float, but there was only a little model of it to see. Most of what you see at this every 4 year convention is for hard rock excavation and processing, but I did see some industrial size placer mining gear here and there. I even saw Jack Hoffman from the show Gold Rush walking around checking out all the new stuff.
 

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kcm

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I don't see why it wouldn't work for beaches, but I'd have to question the use of such a machine on ANY beach....Except possibly Nome. Seems the main problem in trying to get all the gold is that it is difficult to separate the gold from all the black sands. I would tend to think this machine would be moving so much material at once that they'd end up missing a lot of the gold.

I would guess that this is more for working along the gravel bars of rivers - something that is more portable, won't damage the flora/fauna, and can maneuver easily over fairly difficult terrain.
 

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