Pretty cool video. The good thing about wood is that the black sand and gold don't slide down the sluice so fast, like it does with an aluminum or steel sluice. Also, you don't need a long sluice box. If your not catching the gold within a foot or two, most of the gold is probably being blown out. I just put a piece of 1/4 thick plywood at the head of my old keene sluice. It works much better. Jimmygoat
gonna talk crap cause im very self sufficient . what you just saw was pretty much 19th century mining wich if it wasnt for the initial large surface deposits in the west would have turned away alot more old timers then it already did.ther methods were crude and most of their time their recovery sucked.if you have a spot that puts out pickers like that and your spending time building a sluice and not diggin your not finding as much gold as you could be... and i promise you shoveling into a fast running short wood sluice that is not made to catch fine gold like the one this guy made means your basically getting alot of gold wet and into the river. a keene a52 is packable and would recover those pickers plus fines and weighs about the same as that saw and shingle cutter. and the time spent building could be spent diggin. think of this guys for the first time last week my partner and i ran two sluices in a row i always come home with gold from one box classify find pickers lots of fines lead al the normal stuff we all do and talk about we just had an extra sluice and decided to put them one feeding the other.........guess what there was gold in the second box only a little but... we also put less material through then we have into just one box before we rcovered about a pennyweight in two hours.....but there was gold in the second box.........i need like a twenty foot sluice now
just think what he could do with, a 9 volt battery-pair of jumper cables-6' of corugated pipe-roll of duct tape-5 gal. bucket-3/8 expanded metal-window screen-and two ostrich feathers ------------to me i liked the fact that he did it old school, there are better techniques for getting fines,we all know that...but it's good to see some one make home ade lumber that efficient. kind of like looking back in time.
funny when i read some of my posts later i realize the point...... very cool the guy made his own sluice old school.... i spent a whole summer teaching people how to pan gold in Alaska my title was "history interpreutor" (sic) is that spelled right.... i made $ 14.00 an hour in 1998 working for the park service now that i look back it was the best job ive ever had teaching people to pan for gold....... man wheres my time machine.....