Am i wrong with this thought:

[johnnysau]

I keeping seeing people pouring their materials from bucket to sluice or cradle or whatever they are using.
Wouldnt it be much more efficient to add water to the bucket and do a quick swish or whatever to get the cons to the corner of tilted bucket push out the useless material and get your cup of GOODIES much quicker without having to run a bunch of useless material through whatever method your using. I dont have alot of practical experience, any and comments on the best
methods especially with a bucket involved. Wondering
johnnysau

 

[Underburden]

It's all about time. Spend it swishing and hoping you got the gold into the corner of the bucket and then pushing out the 'useless' material and then feeding the sluice, or let the sluice do as it was intended, ridding the useless material and capturing the gold.
Your choice
Bob

 

[Lanny in AB]

I keeping seeing people pouring their materials from bucket to sluice or cradle or whatever they are using.
Wouldnt it be much more efficient to add water to the bucket and do a quick swish or whatever to get the cons to the corner of tilted bucket push out the useless material and get your cup of GOODIES much quicker without having to run a bunch of useless material through whatever method your using. I dont have alot of practical experience, any and comments on the best
methods especially with a bucket involved. Wondering
johnnysau

They have concentrating devices that work on a similar principal, but they cost a lot more than a bucket, and they do a much better job of concentrating the materials.

Plus, once you fill that bucket with water, it's a whole lot heavier to work with, and if it's dry material and you're running it through a sluice, the running water will concentrate it very fast.

Your idea is sound; it just needs refinement to make it functional or practical, but using a sluice may be easier and more efficient than a bucket.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[KevinInColorado]

Sure is hard to liquefy a whole bucket of material...almost impossible!

 

[johnnysau]

The power of water to separate and classify is a very powerful tool under utilized i believe, usually in a bucket theres only
1 tablespoon of material at the bottom that needs to be kept, 99.5% trash .5% cons. If the said bucket is tilted about a 80degree angle the useless material falls out by its self as you add more material and water. No reason to tear up equipment and such with all the by product. And yes you must have the water available to you. I was watching 1 video where the person keep adding dry material from a bucket to the cradle then cradling the material over and over and it made no sense to me, when everything could of been eliminated very quickly utilizing the bucket with the water looking for the .5% at the bottom of the bucket. Maybe what i saw as an illusion of labor anyway ill keep tinkering with my thought.

As always to each his own:
johnnysau

 

[delnorter]

Hey Johnnysau, yes, this will work but I wouldn't try it with more than a 1/4 bucket at a time. A five gallon bucket of material is a heavy load. Heavy to handle and heavy for the bucket to handle very many times in this manner. If you truly do this efficiently you can eliminate the sluice and go directly to the pan for final field separation or pack the cons home to cleanup.

Keep thinking outside the box. Each field situation can require different methods. Volume and efficiency are the key to processing large amounts of material.

Mike

 

[goldog]

When we go out to the diggins please feel free to do that bucket shaking thing and pour up to 99.5% of your bucket over my sluice.

 

[Bodfish Mike]

I was thinking of making a two man pan out of a direct TV dish.
So I don't think your out of line

 

[goldgit'r]

You can get an electric cement mixer from Lowes and do what you are talking about.
I know a guy that uses one to break up and wash heavy clay material.

Wes

 

[2cmorau]

justn idea,

 

[meMiner]

You idea is not wrong, but it may take more than a quick swish to get the fines to the bottom. There is on fellow on a Canadian forum who grabs a half bucket of classified material, adds water, slaps on a lid and takes it home for further processing. He noticed that the rocking of the truck and other vibrations pretty much move the gold to the bottom of the bucket.

 

[2cmorau]

your choice, your back,

 

[Goldwasher]

There is a reason you let your gear do the work for you....good idea but, very time consuming.

 

[Doug Watson]

Easy to test. Try it with the bucket and when you dump out the useless material dump it into a sluice and see what happens.

 

[arizau]

The power of water to separate and classify is a very powerful tool under utilized i believe, usually in a bucket theres only
1 tablespoon of material at the bottom that needs to be kept, 99.5% trash .5% cons. If the said bucket is tilted about a 80degree angle the useless material falls out by its self as you add more material and water. No reason to tear up equipment and such with all the by product. And yes you must have the water available to you. I was watching 1 video where the person keep adding dry material from a bucket to the cradle then cradling the material over and over and it made no sense to me, when everything could of been eliminated very quickly utilizing the bucket with the water looking for the .5% at the bottom of the bucket. Maybe what i saw as an illusion of labor anyway ill keep tinkering with my thought.

As always to each his own:
johnnysau

Have you thought about achieving the same results efficiently and probably with much less effort?

Here is how. Fill your pan and process only to wash the rocks and to stratify and settle the heavies. Scrape off the top and add more material and repeat. You can do this all day or until most of the material left in the pan is black sands. This is an alternative to your proposed method but the use of a sluice is a lot easier than both and is probably less time consuming for handling the same amount of material.

Good luck.

 

[2cmorau]

i would also dump the useless material through a box, just to have a looksey

Easy to test. Try it with the bucket and when you dump out the useless material dump it into a sluice and see what happens.

 

[KevinInColorado]

i would also dump the useless material through a box, just to have a looksey

And most likely to learn that your bucket shaking was losing a lot of gold due to the material failing to liquefy.

 

[delnorter]

Have you thought about achieving the same results efficiently and probably with much less effort?

Here is how. Fill your pan and process only to wash the rocks and to stratify and settle the heavies. Scrape off the top and add more material and repeat. You can do this all day or until most of the material left in the pan is black sands. This is an alternative to your proposed method but the use of a sluice is a lot easier than both and is probably less time consuming for handling the same amount of material.

You're absolutely right Arizau. I do this often and it works very well.

I'll classify a bucket of dry material to 1/2 or 1/8th inch and take it to the river. With a large pan and really vigorous agitation, then swipe the top off, refill and go like the dickens, I can process a lot of material. Take a look see in the black sands to see if the material is worthwhile, dump into a plastic coffee can and get another bucket full.

Mike

 

[johnedoe]

Have you thought about achieving the same results efficiently and probably with much less effort?

Here is how. Fill your pan and process only to wash the rocks and to stratify and settle the heavies. Scrape off the top and add more material and repeat. You can do this all day or until most of the material left in the pan is black sands. This is an alternative to your proposed method but the use of a sluice is a lot easier than both and is probably less time consuming for handling the same amount of material.


You're absolutely right Arizau. I do this often and it works very well.

I'll classify a bucket of dry material to 1/2 or 1/8th inch and take it to the river. With a large pan and really vigorous agitation, then swipe the top off, refill and go like the dickens, I can process a lot of material. Take a look see in the black sands to see if the material is worthwhile, dump into a plastic coffee can and get another bucket full.

Mike

And it is even easier with this pan......... http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/panning-gold/453068-ez-gold-pan.html#post4421337

 

[GrizzlyGremlin]

Using buckets in general while sluicing is very very inefficient.
You must dig into a bucket, the either do the fluidized swishing thing here which would take minutes and minutes, or re shovel the material i to a sluice. As far as Efficiency, and practicality goes, shoveling constantly and directly into your sluice will result in the best capture rates, and most material moved.