Drywasher set up

[Brandx]

Good morning everyone,
I placed an order for my first drywasher a Maverick Gold Buddy Drywasher pretty excited! I have a some question for you more well rounded in this area.
I have heard of people placing duct tape by the riffles on the recovery box?
When setting up the angle on your drywasher and the dirt is flowing are the riffles exposed or covered?

Thanks

 

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[Goodyguy]

Good morning everyone,
I placed an order for my first drywasher a Maverick Gold Buddy Drywasher pretty excited! I have a some question for you more well rounded in this area.
I have heard of people placing duct tape by the riffles on the recovery box?
When setting up the angle on your drywasher and the dirt is flowing are the riffles exposed or covered?

Thanks

The sand/dirt will cascade over the riffles covering them as it flows over them. Should look like muddy water flowing down the sluice.
As far as the duct tape goes it would be applied to the underside of the riffle tray to stop air from flowing through for about 3/4" under and across the upper side of each riffle.

Your box may already have that improvement pre-installed at the factory.

GG~

 

[Brandx]

Thank you GG for the advise.

 

[kazcoro]

I have the same drywasher, and the only bits of advice I can give you are these. I like to really tilt back the grizzly portion. How I do that is either by finding some rocks to put under the front legs, or waiting until I have a nice pile of dirt in front of the sluice and then just pulling back on the whole machine. Of course, you will need to re-adjust the chain on the sluice after doing this. The reason I like to do this, is because now the chute doesn't need to be knocked on. As much. (You will find you will be knocking on the side of the chute/grizzly to get material to flow into the sluice.) I also have opened the little slider on the chute all the way. Haven't changed it since. When you remove the sluice, if you tilt it back, and shake it (with the high side low now), you can see the larger pieces of gold you have captured. You will see almost all of them in the first riffle, with a smaller portion of them in the second riffle. They will almost always be on the right side of the riffle in the corner. When you are looking at it from the back. The reason they are all on this side is because the fan rotates to this side. The torque of the fan drives it all to that side. It's the same principle as when you tap a pan to walk gold out. Now, the riffle box will slide right into a 5 gallon bucket. I use the 5/16 nut driver to tap the back of the riffle box and knock out all the loose dirt. If you have the bucket handy, you don't even need to shut off the blower. Also, you will have to figure on going through one pair of gloves a day scraping off the grizzly. I used mine about 6 or 8 times, and had the blower fan sieze up on me. I thought that it was a sealed unit, but it is not truly "sealed". Dust still gets in there. Carry a can of WD40 with you. You can pry off the dust cap on the top of the fan bearing and squirt it as needed. BTW, the smacking I mentioned is me using a closed backhand fist smacking the side of the grizzly right at the edge where it is rolled over.

 

[kazcoro]

Oh, it catches really fine gold. I haven't even heard of the duct tape mod before.

 

[kazcoro]

And, no, the riffles can be covered. Like GG said, it should look like a cascade of dirt. This is one dirt eating machine. You won't be able to keep up with it by yourself.

 

[Brandx]

Thank you for all your advice Kazcoro. Nice to here from someone that has and is running the same equipment. I have recruited my boy to help me shovel. Kazcoro how many buckets will you run before you do a clean up?

 

[kazcoro]

I run it until the tailings pile hits the end of the riffle box. Then, I re-shovel the tailings pile through a couple of times. That is what I consider a run. Never counted shovels or buckets. In the ground I work, with that length of time for run, the riffles are prob about 1/4 full of black sand. THe way I figure it, if I start running more material than that, I will be running the risk of black sands pushing out gold. I can catch that -200 gold no problem. So fine, I literally have to use a magnifying glass on the clean up table.

 

[kazcoro]

Make sure you feed it steady and keep dirt in the riffle box. If you let it run out of material, you run the risk of all your concentrates getting blown out of the box. I am not saying that you have to keep the riffles completely covered all the time, just that you need to keep material flowing constantly through the machine. If the shoveler is busy scraping, and can't feed the machine steadily enough, one way to keep it fed is for the scraper to use another shovel and re-feed the machine with the tailings pile. The material is right there, and easy to shovel. Just need to keep two shovels on hand.

 

[Cliffy]

I use rtv blue to seal around the riffle tray instead of tape and do a 1/2" to 3/4" dead air space in front of the riffle. You can see it in the last riffle. Also in the corner of the top riffle you can create and little ridge with the rtv to catch and hold the fines. Rtv will outlast the black clothe.
Cliffy

 

[Goodyguy]

.................The dead air space needs to be underneath the uphill angle of each riffle.
The tan colored line represents your difuser cloth and the Blue line shows where the tape should go.
(just so there is no confusion)





GG~

 

[Brandx]

Thank you for your help guys. Now all I need is summer to get here.

 

[kazcoro]

One modification I am going to do soon is to eliminate the lip at the back of the hopper, and also to install a tray at the back of the riffle box. I find that I am unnessecarily scraping rocks off the grizzly and pushing them over the lip there. Also, last time I was out, it was pointed out to me that the riffle wasn't catching all the dirt. I could not figure out why the dirt wasn't hitting the riffle box, and it was a one time thing, but a little catch tray will fix that problem.

 

[Brandx]

Please post pics of the modification when your done.

 

[kazcoro]

I posted up pics. They are on the third page of this thread.http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/g...do-your-gold-prospecting-equipment-today.html

 

[mu50stang]

I recently went drywashing and took home 2 five gallon buckets of the tailings home with me to run to see if I was losing any gold. I ran it through a recirculating sluice and found 6-7 pieces of around 50 mesh gold. Is it normal to lose that much drywashing or do I need to make some adjustments.

 

[Goodyguy]

How much did you catch?

There is always going to be more of a percentage loss when dry washing as opposed to wet.
Loosing 6-7 pieces compaired to getting a hundred is like 93-94 % recovery which would be awesome!

If you are below 75-80% then something probably needs to be addressed.

Such as classification, feed rate, angle, motion, blower. In that order.

GG~

 

[mu50stang]

Thanks GG. I haven't had a chance to go through the cons yet. Do you think running a second time through the drywasher will help or should I worry about moving more material?

 

[Goodyguy]

Thanks GG. I haven't had a chance to go through the cons yet. Do you think running a second time through the drywasher will help or should I worry about moving more material?

Depends on the amount of losses and how long it takes to re-run tailings as opposed to running virgin paydirt.
Running more paydirt per day will usually more than make up for any losses.
Running more paydirt per minute however, could increase the losses.

It's almost always more productive to run virgin paydirt than wasting time running tailings.

Here's why:
Let's say that in a 5 gallon bucket there are 20 flakes but you lose a fourth of them = 5 flakes.
It took 5 minutes to run that 5 gallon bucket of virgin material. = 15 flakes cause you lost 5 of them.
It takes 5 minutes to run a 5 gallon bucket of tailings = 5 flakes and that is if you get 100% of them which you wont.

So you see running virgin paydirt should equal more gold at the end of the day even if you are loosing 1/4 of the gold.
Of course my example did not factor in the amount of time it took to fill a bucket with virgin paydirt vs filling a bucket with tailings.

But as you can see from my example that you would have to be losing a very significant amount of gold to justify running tailings vs virgin paydirt.



GG~

 

[kazcoro]

I always re-run my tailings. I get a nice pile of tailings under the riffle box and then when I am ready to shut down, I just shovel the tailings onto the griz. Only takes a couple of minutes. Also, if your feed rate is slow, you can shovel tailings into the machine periodically to keep material in the riffles.