Under construction: Bucket Buddy

[Capt Nemo]

Found a way to loose gold! Over feed it! I was feeding scoops and found it to be blowing out gold big time. The scoops were about half the volume of the bed, and before the material fluidizes the displacement forces the gold out. So it wants to be spoon fed rather than scoop fed. Also I may want to cut back the number of jets on the tail tube as it might be too active. There should be enough water to power a header box attachment to it to allow the use of a scoop.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Family Maps of Hinds County, Mississippi, Deluxe Edition - Grab it through Amazon!

[KevinInColorado]

I LOVE how much of your learning you are sharing here, thanks!

 

[Capt Nemo]

Thanks Kevin!

Building a recirc fluid bed is easy, but optimizing it for conditions is the hard part. If I can get them to nail the finest beach sands then they'll catch everything else. The above failure proves that there's gold flying around the bed like glitter off a stripper. Get it too high in the bed, and you loose it. My best guess is the gold may be moving in the bottom 3" of the bed, and the 5 1/2" deep bed holds it. Create a condition where that fluidized gold can move higher, and you have loss. So you have to keep displacements small. That might be part of the problem with gold traps and -150 gold. They're too shallow to handle the displacement waves caused by shoveling into them. Keeping a steady flow of material would also minimize the effects of displacement waves.

 

[goldog]

This is great Capt. I've added this displacement wave info to my fluid head journal.

 

[Capt Nemo]

Running the cons from my last trip with a spoon instead of a scoop, I still found gold loss. Seemed like bed action was real hot on one side and didn't seem to respond to throttling. No locked up areas, but some were a little more viscous than normal. May have clogged a number of jets, which would give higher pressures on the open jets. I'll clean the jets and re-run the cons again with a spoon before a 100% panning of the tailings. If I find gold in the tailings, I'll replumb with less jets at the tail.