John-Edmonton
Silver Member
A friend of mine from Adventures in Gold Prospecting and I were discussing some old designs that worked well 35 years ago in highbankers to capture flour gold. He liked some of the concepts, so he designed and built one and as per my request, installed some 1/2" x 1/2" square matting. So, the finished trial version is basically a drop riffle highbanker. It operates at about 1500 gph using a 2000 gph bilge pump tuned back to about 1500 gph to the point where the riffles don't clean themselves out. It is set at about 8 degrees.
Because my area has mostly fine flour gold, the hopper is screened very small. There are 50 drop riffles in the unit, and as mentioned they start out short and expand wider horizontally as they progress down the sluice. I used a Budweiser pull tab to compare sizes.
Inside the hopper is miners moss over small V matting, which captures a large percentage of gold. My first run showed it captured over 50% of my run. I may have had losses out of my sluice due to tweaking the angles and water flow.
It is Canada Geese birthing season. Looks like a good run on babies this year.😂
Underneath the 1/2" drop riffle is a V matting cut to fit in the unit. Because my concentrates are screened so small, they can be readily cleaned on the V matting, doing a great job of capturing the flour gold and getting rid of most of the blond and black sands. These super concentrates are now ready for back panning at home. So, I might as well do this step at the river, as I already have a source of water, a unit dialed into the right angle and matting in place to complete the task.
Here's my final clean up after about a 4 hour run. The unit has been called the "Wedgy" due to it's odd shape. My next trial is to run the unit without the drop riffle system and use only the V matting to capture the gold and other heavies. This is how we used to run some of the units 35 years ago to capture the flour gold. Running it on V matting allows the user in real time to see when the riffles are starting to fill up with flour gold, where on the sluice area matting and to also tune it efficiently in real time. Combining a high capture rate system in the hopper plus a properly tuned lower sluice should work well, with minimal amounts of concentrates. Dang, got to love retirement! I like the flaring principle although not new, it allows the gold to drop out where the right variables exist.
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